Posts about activism

Gurus, mavens and experts convey information — they tell you the way things are.

Organizers, conversely, cultivate leadership and facilitate a community's exploration of its vision — they offer a way to see how things could be.

Naturally, we need an accurate picture of how things are before we can strategize ways to improve them, and so it's important to continually listen to and learn from the experts, taking from them relevant information and measuring it against our own experience and knowledge. But folks involved in social change — online or offline — can't stay there. We have to be willing to step up and do the difficult organizing work that leverages our knowledge and experts' data into something larger: a movement.

If organizers limit themselves to seeing Twitter as a strategy in and of itself — without considering the strategy apart from the tool — they risk overlooking ways to run a more effective campaign on other platforms, or augmenting a campaign using multiple platforms. Worse, organizers risk giving supporters feel-good activism that quenches their desire for social change without actually moving the movement closer to a concrete goal, or putting any pressure on powerholders.

The strategy always comes first, and then you figure out which tool fits. The alternative? A forest fire.

Some nonprofits, older and more institutionalized, are wary of giving their members "control" of their "message" in the realm of social networks and social media. Mostly, I think that's nothing more than a fear of losing power. When you think you know how to change the world, it can be hard for some people to want to involve others — or give anyone else the credit. What's interesting here is that there's a significant ability for activists to self-organize. The message to nonprofits from the past few years seems pretty clear: Stand in our way, and we'll just go around you.

Offering concrete ideas for how to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem can give people a sense that they, as individuals, have a stake in an issue. The Genocide Intervention Network links to a list of "ten things you can do to stop genocide." Ivan Boothe argues that these steps, broken down into easily digestible chunks, give people an easy way to participate. Although they also link to the Genocide Intervention Network's main web site, that isn't always the point. "A number of these steps aren't even within our organization," Boothe says. This sort of advocacy is similar to bottom-up, open-source collaborative projects like Wikipedia, in which no one group has proprietary ownership over an idea or a product; instead, the goal is a constant generation of awareness and ideas. A MySpaceMySpace is a social network that is not built around a single identity. Users can and do have multiple profiles, with no restrictions on the "names" they use. Users have near-total control over their profile's appearance. MySpace is used by many bands and musical groups, and continues to be popular among the non-college oriented crowd, in comparison to Facebook. page, says Boothe, isn't simply an advertisement for an organization, "it's a tool for mobilizing people for different kinds of action."