These five sentences from Tom Friedman’s column in the NY Times about Egypt made me sit up straight out of bed on a beautiful Sunday Morning.
“No doubt Facebook helped a certain educated class of Egyptians to spread the word about the Tahrir Revolution. Ditto Twitter.
But, at the end of the day, politics always comes down to two very old things: leadership and the ability to get stuff done.
How often have you heard lately: “Oh, I tweeted about that.” Or “I posted that on my Facebook page.” Really? In most cases, that’s about as impactful as firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy.”
“Unless you get out of Facebook and into someone’s face, you really have not acted. And, as Syria’s vicious regime is also reminding us: “bang-bang” beats “tweet-tweet” every day of the week.” Now I’m going to post this on Facebook. Really. And I did.
cross posted on Mass Policy and Organizing Leadership Academy
My 18 year old son will be attending UMass/Boston next fall, and needs an apartment. He has been “looking” since April. For him, “looking” means browsing Facebook and craigslist. He’s a good kid, doing the best he can.
He still doesn’t have an apartment.
He is learning this lesson the hard way (as he did in his successful job search last year at this time) — “looking for an apartment” requires actually talking to real people, actually visiting real prospective properties, and actual meat-space effort.
As vital as the web is, virtual reality is still virtual. Tweets are virtual; bullets and clubs are real.
Along the same lines, I recommend anyone celebrating Netroots Nation this weekend also read The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov to balance things out. It is all to easy to fall into the trap of thinking that something that facilitates political action is political action.
Thanks for posting this Judy. I usually skip over Friedman’s column, as I did this morning, because I generally don’t find much new there.
…I was pretty successful using apartment rental sites to search by criteria I’ve established. Of course you need to ultimately call about availability and a visit wouldn’t hurt, but still much easier than I can imagine it was before the internet. I don’t know what UMB’s housing situation is, but if I’m an 18-year-old looking for housing, I’d be assuming to live in on-campus dorms.
My other children have each lived on-campus during their freshman year. Sadly, that is not an option for UMass/Boston, there is no on-campus housing. There are two complexes nearby (on the peninsula) but they are exorbitantly expensive and not well suited for his needs and desires.
I’m certainly not suggesting that the net doesn’t help (after all, I make my living doing net-based software), I’m instead reminding folks that there is no substitute for real-time meat-space first-hand experience. Far from not hurting, I think making a year-long commitment to an apartment you’ve never seen in a neighborhood you’ve never set foot in is a prescription for disaster. I think it’s far better to visit a neighborhood during the day and again at night, walk around, and just see what the vibe is before signing a lease.
Recently read a debate published in U-Mass Boston’s student newspaper Mass Media about the proposal to create two residential dorms. One point made against was that the average age at U-Mass is 25, and “what 25 year old is going to want to live in a dorm?”
I’ve attended and taught at a few colleges and universities, two of which were commuter schools (Masters at Rutgers-Newark, and an Organic Farming Certificate at Bristol Community College). I’m left uncertain as to the effect of creating a sort of hybrid, but providing those who want to live away from home with an affordable option seems like a reasonable proposition.
What’s the difference between posting something on Facebook and Twitter and posting it on nytimes.com? I’m guessing Friedman thinks his own words are highly useful, even though those aren’t getting into people’s faces in person. Is it scale of audience? If someone has hundred of thousands of followers instead of dozens, is it then useful to post on Facebook or to tweet? What about writing a letter to the editor? Is that also like firing a mortar into the Milky Way? If not, why not? If so, why bother?
Facebook and Twitter both strive to create “virtual reality” (“virtuality”), whereas nytimes.com strives to be a newspaper. Ted Nelson (inventor of hypertext) coined the phrase “virtuality” to mean “what a system seems to be”. A well-made movie is a “love story” or a “detective thriller” — the audience is unaware of all the cameras, lights, and stagecraft involved in producing it. The “love story” or “detective thriller” is the virtuality of a movie. The virtuality of Facebook and Twitter is a virtual reality, very different from the virtuality of nytimes.com (an online newspaper).
What I think Judy was getting at is that too many people forget that the virtual reality of Facebook and Twitter isn’t enough on its own. Both tools can be incredibly useful in “meat space” — if they are intentionally used that way. Flash mobs are a great example of how social media can augment real life. So I don’t see this as an effort to attack the medium, but instead to remind us that it augments, rather than replaces, real life.
For you
Is Friedman saying that the reason protestors in Syria are not making progress against the Assad regime is because they are relying too much on social media and not “getting out of Facebook and into someone’s face?”
As far as I can tell, many Syrians are continuing to risk their lives by demonstrating in the streets. It’s pretty hard, though, to get into someone’s face if they have a gun pointed at you. Syria right now is disproving the adage that the pen (virtual or real) is mightier than the sword.
About 10% of Egyptians have access to the Internet, and the number dips significantly if one excludes the pro-Mubarak moneyed class. The revolution was televised, but it wasn’t on Facebook. This myth has to die.
I’ve never been one to downplay the usefulness of the Net, whether traditional web sites or various social media (though I remain sort of confused as to the purpose of Twitter and FourSquare); I’ve found several apartments and jobs via Craigslist–and my wife on yet another site (not that I was wife-shopping; when I moved to Boston a little over a decade ago not knowing a soul, anything that hooked me up with people was a godsend). And prior to the emergence of FB, the ACT-MA list-serv was my entree into far-left politics. These were all, in some literal fashion, life-changers for me.
As for FB, I suppose I’m a power-user: I run several organizational pages, my own page tends to attract people smarter than I am, and most important, it’s the single most important tool I have for keeping me abreast of news I might have missed (it’s neither the NYT nor the Nation–nor BMG for that matter–but it steers me there/here and elsewhere each morning) and, most important, events of an organizational nature.
That said, I’ve decried “clicktivism” myself. The idea that by “Liking” something, I’ve accomplished something, is obviously ridiculous; worse yet were all those “A Million Voices for X” that were proliferating some months back, which encouraged people to believe that a mouse-click was helping to re-arrange the order of the cosmos (but is that so different from attaching any of the many available magnetic ribbons to the car?). As others have indicated on here, it’s just important to keep in mind that these tools are means to ends. Just tools, and not ends.
The thing is, I don’t believe that too many people who are drawn to real-world activity, whether it’s canvassing or sign-holding or signature-gathering or marching or camping out in public squares or lobbying in the State House or serving in town government–etc.–cut back on these activities because they feel they’ve done their part online. As for the slacktivists, sure, it’s bothersome to see them confusing significant and meaningless activity–but they were unlikely to do more in the first place, and could be that their nascent FB-fed awareness of some cause or another will lead them to take some additional steps down the road.
My own issues with FB, and this is in part due to the “Friends” I have:
–Cause fatigue. One glance at my newsfeed and I’m half-exhausted already. From denunciations of the Fed to warnings about chemtrails to various Occupy invitations, I’m being invited to “do something about” far more than I can even think about, much less act upon. On the plus side, I find I’m often able to redirect, and to share them with folks for whom these are primary points of focus. Especially chemtrails (where do I meet some of these people I sometimes wonder).
–Depression. Again, because of those on my feed, I see an awful lot of collapsitarian thinking. Climate-change/peak oil/unsustainability/casino capitalism is gonna be the death of us all, and sooner than I think. Maybe so. But it can be a grim read.
–The echo chamber. Related to the above. It’s not simply a matter of many of us preaching to/sitting in the choir; it’s also the skewed perspective I wind up with. It starts becoming easy to believe that everyone is concerned with climate change and everyone is upset with NDAA or SOPA or whatever, and to forget that those acronyms mean nothing to 95% of the population, or even that most folks agree with me (which is why I always smile when folks like my [real-world] friend Rob at RMG drop some pearls of wisdom on my page. RIght before my head explodes) .
–Reductionism. Why, “I just recently posted on FB” a screed about how those damn so-called “memes”–an image with some sancrosanct quote attached–are ruining my feed. That Howard Zinn said something doesn’t make it any more true than if my neighbor across the street did (with all due respect to the late and VERY lamented professor,whom I like to think would have agreed). Worse yet is the reduction of VERY complex issues to bumper-sticker sloganeering.
–Time-wasting. This I’m not sure about. The argument is favor is, I think, that because of the reach provided each of us by FB, we can hit thousands of people by reposting a link, one that will be reposted ad infinitum, thereby increasing awareness–it’s been my experience that people DO attend to these Friedmanesque mortar shells flying overhead. But again, awareness isn’t enough. And for those of us prone to verbosity, and who feel compelled to respond to a one-liner on FB with a seven-paragraph screed, opinionating at such length in so ethereal and ephemeral a space may not represent the best use of our time. But that’s just me.
My own policy when posting a link or opinion is: can people actually do something about this, and can I provide some call to action?
Oh, and you’re all free to friend me.
I recently looked at several dozen MA DTC FB pages. Pretty much what you’d expect. My analysis below, if you’re interested. But I’m more interested in any success stories, and in hearing from anyone who’s used Facebook to create an effective–in any way!– Democratic Town Committee page (I just created a page for Stoughton DTC).
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Quick ‘n Dirty Analysis of Exiting State DTC Facebook Pages
1. Most MA DTC FB pages have between 2 and 100 Likes. 30 would seem to be about average.
2. Logos range from highly professional Illustrator-generated graphics to simply cribbing the donkey or cap-D logo.
3. Most are now using Timeline; profile headers range from well-planned to non-existent.
4. Little to zero audience participation–usually zero–and zero sharing of links by visitors.
5. Most pages combine links to national stories with announcements and some photo sets.
Analysis:
1. Most MA DTC FB pages are pretty weak.
2. That’s not always the fault of the creators and admins; like so many organizational Facebook pages, they suffer from a lack of audience participation. Even folks who use FB regularly often don’t seem to understand that social media is–done right, anyway–lateral and bottom-up; instead, audiences tend to treat institutional pages as though they’re web sites–a vehicle for top-down messaging from on high.
3. Following up on that: probably the biggest problem with these pages is the lack of SHARES.
4. Many are nothing but repositories for repurposed links. Nothing wrong with the occasional links to mainstream and/or alterna press stories. But a local page needs to be more than yet another of the countless link-aggregator pages out there.
5. Poor use of imagery. This drives me crazy. We do ourselves no favors posting out-of-focus shots of Elizabeth Warren or Barney Frank looking like Boris Karloff. And nothing says boring like poorly lit photos of folks sitting around at tables. Esp with a blown-up PowerPoint slide in the background.
6. Lack of Events. Makes the Committee appear moribund.
7. Low number of likes. Most pages appear to be “Liked” by Committee members and a few others. They’re preaching to the choir.
STOUGHTON FB PAGE::
FB Page Mission:
1. Keep Committee members in touch, abreast of relevant events, informed about the State and National Party, candidate events and canvassing, etc.
2. Use as a vehicle for our reps to communicate with the Committee and the public at large
3. Promote candidates, legislation and philosophy to the town at large
4. Encourage local participation in the DTC
5. Potential fundraising medium
FB Page Goals:
1. Regular updates by Admins and Friends
2. SHARING all posted information by Friends on THEIR personal pages. THIS IS CRITICAL.
3. Communication by our district reps (state and federal) along with State Party leaders
4. Get 25 new likes per month over the next six months
FB PAGE Tactics:
1. Get everyone in the DTC who is on FB to “Like the Page”
2. At next meeting, talk about importance of visiting regularly and RE-POSTING material on their pages–along with “check out and Like our page”
3. Note the page address in all communications
4. Include address in local digital efforts (e.g., PATCH blog)
5. Consider a small spend on a FB ad targeting Stoughton Democrats only
6. Contact reps and State Party leaders; invite them to participate
7. Include high-res, edited photos of events; video as well (does Stoughton DTC have both Flickr and YouTube accounts?)