Excerpted from one of the more interesting responses to Malcolm Gladwell’s article that the revolution won’t be tweeted.
Below a must see video from Stefana Broadbent showing the link between social media and increasing intimacy.
Maria Popova:
“Online communities broaden our scope of empathy. (The digital anthropologist Stefana Broadbent has done some interesting work in that vein.) They do so by introducing new issues to our collective consciousness and exposing us to the lives these issues affect. In cases where our “in-group” lacks direct experience of such concerns, empathy is the missing link between awareness and action — it’s what enables us to act for the well-being of others, as in the case of El-Khewani.
Maybe Wikipedia, as Gladwell argues, wouldn’t have helped Dr. Martin Luther King – the question is moot because it takes new ecosystems of authority and tries to retrofit them to old political structures – but sites like ScraperWiki do help the data democracy fighters of today and platforms like HelpMeInvestigate harness the social web to support those working toward one of the most critical issues in digital activism: political and institutional transparency.
Historic protests are being organized on Facebook. In 2008, in Colombia, a country where the largest public protest to date had been attended by 20,000 people, a Facebook campaign orchestrated by a young engineer incited an estimated 4.8 million people to participate in 365 protests against the Revolutionary Armed Forces known as FARC. In 2009, a similar Facebook effort in Bulgaria brought together the largest public protests since the fall of communism, which resulted in the resignation of several Parliament members accused — and later convicted — of corruption. In a recent speech on internet freedom, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the example of a 13-year-old boy who used the social web to organize blood drives after the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. And, most recently, Adam Penenberg used Twitter in a fine piece of investigative journalism to uncover the details of a $131-million death verdict against Ford that traditional media had failed to access.
Most human rights violations, from discrimination to genocide, can be attributed to one or both of two root causes: pluralistic ignorance (the tendency of a group’s members to incorrectly believe that the majority condones an injustice) and diffusion of responsibility (the conviction that someone else will take action against the injustices we are aware of). It takes a critical mass of awareness and assignment of responsibility for injustice to end. While the social web, with its inherent anonymity and predilection for slacktivism, may do little in the way of assigning responsibility, it has a monumental effect on awareness. Today, it is impossible to participate actively in the social web and be unaware of the existence of climate change or Aung San Suu Kyi. And while many will join a Facebook group as a badge of affiliation with a cause rather than take real action, a few will be driven by social-media-engendered empathy and indignation to start NGOs, invent humanitarian design solutions, or lobby in Congress.
Examples span the entire spectrum of activism – from access to knowledge (such as TED’s thriving online community of volunteer translators, who have made thousands of TED talks available in over 75 languages) to humanitarian fundraising (like Amanda Rose’s Twestival, the Twitter-powered global grassroots organization that raised more than $250,000 for Charity Water’s clean drinking water work in 2009 and more than $460,000 for Concern Worldwide’s education work in 2010) to humanitarian crisis management (such as Ushahidi’s crowdsourced maps of disaster information during the Haiti and Chile earthquakes that wiped out traditional information infrastructures).
In light of these examples and many more out there, I find Gladwell’s contention that “innovators tend to be solipsists” particularly disheartening. (Though I should be careful – Gladwell isn’t sparing with insults; he called a Huffington Post writer who challenged his declarations about social media a “narcissist.”) Perhaps, after all, his is a failure of recognizing not the sociology of activism but the psychology of altruism as a backbone of the social web’s capacity for good.
Ultimately, most injustice is about marginalization; an individual or group is denied resources available to the rest of society. In the civil rights era, the boundaries were often about access to public space as a designator of status and equality — back versus front of the bus, sit-down tables versus lunch counter. In the digital era, boundaries frequently pertain to one’s access to information. But just as our notion of public space has evolved to encompass digital space and the data it contains, our definition of activism should be modified to incorporate efforts to protect speech and provide access in this new public realm. To negate the power of the social web as a mechanism of this kind of activism is to deny the evolution of the social planes on which justice and injustice play out.
As the internet scholar Evgeny Morozov has famously said, “Technology doesn’t necessarily pry more information from closed regimes; rather, it allows more people access to information that is available.” But access is the first tile in a domino effect of awareness, empathy and action. The power of the social web lies in the sequence of its three capacities: To inform, to inspire and to incite.”
Video: