In social media for social change, you still have to use all the old skills of coalition-building, strategic planning, creative social action, managing relationships and preventing burnout.
Over at the NetSquared blog, Joe Solomon
provided a great roundup
of reasons people might be “jaded about social media for change” and ways they
overcome it.
I’ve been getting Twitter DMs from top players in the nonprofit tech and
social media for change space – sharing how they’re unmotivated or jaded with
using the web and social media for change. As if the phrase has lost its
meaning somehow. Or a bubble had been burst. I know I’ve been feeling the same
way. Perhaps you’ve been feeling it too – or come across others with a
similar vibe?
Joe runs through some great responses from a whole bevy of
social-media-for-change folks, including me.
One of the comments on Joe’s blog post was from
Texans Against Hunger. Here’s what
the author said:
Funny, I clicked on this post from Twitter expecting a realistic conversation
about the limitations of social media tools. Instead, it appears everyone took
your question about being jaded to mean “How can I get un-jaded,” and not,
“Should I be jaded?”
The assumption of most twitters above seems to be that these tools work
because they’re cool OR they’ve built a career around them, so if you’re
feeling jaded due to lack of results or encouraging metrics, get over it and
get back to your (disappointing) work.
IMO, social media tools are pretty poor at changing anything that takes more
than one or two mouse-clicks. Sometimes that’s all you need – making a
donation, sending petitions, affecting website ratings, flooding online polls,
etc.
Most change, unfortunately, doesn’t happen at the end of a mouse-click. But in
the long run, these tools also do a good job of hoovering up potential
participants for offline actions that will make a difference.
Perhaps our jadedness comes from a disconnect between the revolutionary nature
of the tool, and its less-than-mindblowing uses? If that’s the case we’ll be
managing our own expectations, given enough time.
I thought the author made some good points that “social change techies” would do
well to keep in mind. I can see how the author might have gotten the impression
that some or all of the folks in Joe’s roundup are simply shiny-tech pushers. I
won’t try to speak for them, but I do think they aren’t blindly following the
latest tech hype and hoping it will change the world – many of them have clear
social change strategies.
My own background is rooted in a) on-the-ground community organizing, including
100+ hours of training and many times that in actual organizing, and b) academic
study of how nonviolent social change can be successful (my degree is in peace
and conflict studies). I know “social change” can be kind of a squishy term (and
even more so the strategy-free “social good,” which Katrin Verclas has
amply discussed),
so I want to position myself as specifically interested in fundamental social
change, at the political, social, economic and cultural levels. I don’t see the
challenges as being easily fixed, or short-term, or things that can be addressed
with a few pieces of legislation or a few institutional reforms.
With that in mind, I think social media and social networking hasn’t entirely
matured as part of long-term social change. Where it has been getting
integrated into social justice organizing, it’s largely been outside the United
States, in places like
Colombia
and
Egypt.
And even there, while we can see important strategic concessions, not enough
time has really passed to see the extent to which social media helped advance
social justice campaigns.
I entirely share the author’s frustration with “tech for social change”
discussions that fawn over the technology and don’t engage on the level of
strategic change. I saw this happening in particular during the
Moldovan “Twitter revolution” discussion
(which Joe linked to in his post). This “revolution” seemed to captivate a lot
of armchair activists on Twitter, mostly because it involved Twitter. They
seemed to miss the fact that a) Twitter wasn’t actually a big part of the
organizing strategy, and b) the campaign itself didn’t end up seriously
threatening the regime; at best it was a mild skirmish and it certainly wasn’t a
“revolution” of any kind.
(Which is not to diminish the hard work of social justice organizers in Moldova.
Mad props to them.)
The author’s point about social media providing an outlet for people’s
activism that sucks away people’s time for real social change is an excellent
one. (A similar dynamic happens every two to four years in the US, when
community organizers see their ranks cannibalized by electoral organizing.)
Charles Lenchner has written brilliantly about this, using the principle
“mission over membership.”
Too many nonprofits orchestrate “petition drives” that aren’t about advocating
for anything other than larger membership rolls. Too many groups ask
constituents to make calls to an elected official without even feigning an
attempt at explaining how those calls will help achieve a goal or contribute to
a longer-term campaign. The author is absolutely right that too many
nonprofits have no social change theory at all; indeed they’re more interested
in self-perpetuation than winning (often referred to as the
nonprofit industrial complex).
And when those groups get their hands on social media, they do incredibly
un-strategic things with them.
The fact that social media can be used unstrategically, however, doesn’t mean
it has to be. To pull a line from my
earlier post on Twitter,
political pamphlets, phone trees and jam-the-faxes must have seemed like
strategies in and of themselves when each technology first came out. But smart
social justice organizers recognized them as tactics, and such tactics were only
effective when deployed as part of an overall strategy for social change.
Social media doesn’t mean you do less organizing – it means you (can) do it
better, or at least differently. You still have to use all the old skills of
coalition-building, strategic planning, creative social action, managing
relationships and preventing burnout. None of that goes away just because you’re
engaging with people on Facebook instead of in town halls.
So to get ‘round to the original question – the reason I don’t feel jaded when
I look at all the unstrategic uses of social media is because I’m focused on the
end goal, the social change. Social justice organizers are a pretty creative
bunch. Throughout history, they’ve taken a wide variety of technologies and used
them strategically to move their campaigns forward. I have no doubt social media
has and will become one tool in many organizers’ toolbelts.
