Guest Post by Ivan Boothe: Social change takes more than social media

Submitted by Ivan Boothe, publisher of the Rootwork Blog

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, and ones "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.

Image credit Flickr user foreversouls

This article was originally posted on the Rootwork Blog at http://rootwork.org/blog/2009/05/social-change-takes-more-social-media by Ivan Boothe:

Ivan works with nonprofits and social change groups, developing websites and doing online strategy around advocacy, fundraising and member engagement, putting to use the experience he gained co-founding the Genocide Intervention Network.

Comments

[stephen]

excellent post.

one more thing we should consider when thinking about social change in the context of social media is similar to what was alluded with regard to electoral politics: social media is a 'fact' with which those interested in social change must contend. whether social change activists are there to engage people, people will, at least for 'now' (understanding the 'present' to be very flexible in terms of duration), be 'there', using social media for interaction, information, entertainment, and even 'engagement' with the world.

the vast majority of people i 'know' on social media platforms are just regular folks (read: not social change activists or npic professionals) who are far less geeky than i am and much less interested in the 'revolutionary' potential of the internet. for them, the internet just 'is' a part of their lives - increasingly so (in terms of the amount of time they spend 'on' it and it's importance in maintaining their affiliative bonds with others). because social change requires being able to engage people where they are in order to discuss a different kind of social present, (at least some) social change activists must contend with social media as part of their strategy for change.

the problem with some of the 'hype' around social media as a 'revolutionary' tool for social change is that, quite frankly, it is looking at the problem from the wrong end. social media is not the 'solution' to our social change problems; it is part of the 'problem' (read: more as a puzzle than harmful thing or process) we are trying to 'solve'.

[Cherita]

Thank you for this post!

One of the things that gets to me about the incessant discussion of “the revolutionary tool for social change that is social media” is that somewhere in there people seem to have forgotten what a *tool* is, exactly. I can have the most revolutionary hammer and a thoroughly innovative buzzsaw and awesome new nails and the newest wood on the market. But, if I want to build a house it won't get built until I use the tools and build it, which I can't do until *after* I've thought a lot about it and planned in detail exactly what kind of house I want to build. It's the same with social change. Tools don't effect change, people do. Specifically, inspired people with a plan.

And that is where a lot of nonprofits go wrong, not just with their use of social media, but in general. Like you touched on, too many are focused more on self-perpetuation than social change, and I think that is a huge problem within the nonprofit field as a whole, not just with their use of social media. So many organizations are so concerned with funding (understandably), they forget about what it is they're trying to fund in the first place. And, rather than really working to inspire their memberships and communities to become passionate, engaged social change activists first, many nonprofits cater to passive action to get the immediate dollars or members. “All you have to do to help better the world is click here – donate now – sign this form! That's it!” And, well, no. That's not it. But organizations have been doing that since before web 2.0, so it's really not surprising that many use it that way now. I'm not sure why people thought Twitter would change that.

[Rick]

This part captures the essence of the post:

"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."

We call it here in the Philippines... "There's no substitute for the real thing." A member of our group, wrote something similar,

"The use of the Internet and the like is in fact complementary to people’s actions. Applications in the Internet make networking, coordination and information dissemination a cinch for cause-oriented organizations. However it does not have the same nature and impact as on-the-ground protest actions.

Without the numbers on the ground, what effect would a virtual campaign do? If not geared toward mobilizing people into action, virtual campaigns produce virtual gains. At most, the cyberworld becomes another outlet for opinions and discussions. Clicking a button to join a cause is easy and would actually contribute to the high numbers in virtual causes like that in Facebook. Yet translating these mouse-clicks into attendance in rallies and action should be the real target."

The full article is posted here.