35 cents: social media and social activism

I've been meaning to call attention to this Malcolm Gladwell piece for a week, but just haven't had the opportunity.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

Gladwell goes on to throw cold water on the notion that revolutions in Moldova and Iran were fomented by twitter and facebook (how many people have Internet access in Moldova, why were the Iranian election protest tweets and facebook postings in English rather than Farsi?), and to note that even when social media seems to have been extremely successful, say in soliciting contributions for Darfur, the commitment to the cause is reed thin. Social media is useful at building networks, but not at building deep connections among people. A facebook friend is not, really, a friend.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Keep that in mind the next time you read a "report" on Sarah Palin's latest twit.

W. Horace Carter, 88

Bitterly opposed the KKK when they began recruiting in the Carolinas -- the Carolinas! -- in 1950.

“The Klan, despite its Americanism plea, is the personification of Fascism and Nazism,” he wrote. “It is just such outside-the-law operations that lead to dictatorships through fear and insecurity.”

Thus began Mr. Carter’s campaign against the Klan, a fiercely antagonistic opposition to the organization’s policies and methods and its very presence in Columbus County, N.C., and Horry County, S.C. Over three years, his paper ran more than 100 Klan-related stories and editorials that he wrote. They reported and commented on rallies, shootings, beatings and a series of floggings that eventually brought the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the region and ended with federal and state prosecutions of more than 100 Klansmen, including Thomas Hamilton, who was known as the Grand Dragon of the Association of Carolina Klans.

Mr. Carter stood up to numerous personal threats against himself and his family. He was twice visited in his office by Hamilton, who promised retribution against The Tabor City Tribune and its advertisers. And though he more than once published letters defending the Klan in his paper, he found himself somewhat isolated by his community, where many people shared the Klan’s pro-Christian, anti-Communist outlook and were roused as well by its white-supremacist exhortations.

“He was a God-and-country kind of guy,” Russell Carter said about his father. “But he was committed to social justice, and he was not prepared for the fact that other people didn’t see it that way. He had very meager support, especially early on.”

Can the majority marry the minority? Cause they sure enjoy screwing them.

Steven Goldman very eloquently demolishes the illogic of the Yes on Prop8 vote and anti-gay marriage generally. To put it briefly, it's called the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

UPDATE: Helps to actually have a hyperlink.

All your futures belong to us

Paul Campos ponders the possibility of a Barack Obama victory.

William F. Buckley

It couldn't have been pleasant for Buckley these past few years watching as "conservatism" was wrenched from his hands and sent on its current wild ride. I'm sure that in a way, having only recently lost the terrific woman he called his wife, and experiencing the tail end of a cliff diving exercise known as "compassionate conservatism (aka, 'the darkside')," he was ready to go.

And Ezra notices he's only the latest of capital T "Thinkers" to pass on with no one there to replace their wit and ideas.

As a slightly more general point, in the last two or three years, a whole host of giants have passed away, men who were political thinkers at a time when that made you a cultural figure. John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Norman Mailer, and now, William F. Buckley Jr. Gore Vidal is just about the last of their number left. And that's a shame. They would write serious books of political analysis and sell millions of copies -- they were the writers you had to read to call yourself an actual political junkie. Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the Coulters and O'Reilly's of the world. Where we once prized a tremendous facility for wit, we're now elevating those with a tremendous storehouse for anger. Run a search on quotes from Galbraith, Buckley, or Friedman, then do the same for O'Reilly and Coulter. We're really losing something here. And we don't even have Molly Ivins around to wrest it back.

Exactly. This is what we have in return.

But, before we get too misty-eyed thinking about the thought leaders of the 1960s...well, I'm here not to praise William F. Buckley, but to bury him.

Federalism has come a long way too. In the 60s it grew fat on segregation, taking up the states' rights argument for allowing jim crow to die in bed. The Tribune couldn't countenance the Birmingham bombings, but William Buckley's National Review, which would champion Barry Goldwater for president the following year, was able to. "Let us gently say," it said, "the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur -- of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro." The magazine said some evidence supported this possibility.

"And let it be said," the National Review declared, "that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court's manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free."

He was wrong about a lot of things, even if he didn't scream out his wrongheadedness the way his scions do now.

And he was right about some things.

It's worse than you think

"Voter fraud:" The big picture.