The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [101]
chapter seven
Why Kierkegaard Hates Slacktivism
If you’ve been to Copenhagen, you’ve probably seen the Stork Fountain, one of the city’s most famous sights. The fountain was made even more famous thanks to a quirky Facebook experiment. In spring 2009 Anders Colding-Jorgensen, a Danish psychologist who studies how ideas spread online, put the famous fountain at the center of his research project. He started a Facebook group that implied—but never said so explicitly—that the city authorities were about to demolish the fountain. This threat was completely fictitious; Colding-Jorgensen himself had dreamed it up. He publicized the group to 125 of his Facebook friends, who joined the cause in a matter of hours. It was not long before their friends joined, too, and the imaginary Facebook campaign against Copenhagen’s city council went viral. At the peak of its online success, the group had two new members joining every minute. When the count reached 27,500, Colding-Jorgensen decided it was time to end his little experiment.
There are two strikingly different ways to make sense of the Stork Fountain experiment. Cynics might say that the campaign took off simply because Colding-Jorgensen looked like a respected activist academic—just the kind of guy to start a petition about saving a fountain on Facebook. His online friends were likely to share his concern for the preservation of Denmark’s cultural heritage, and since joining the group did not require anything other than clicking a few buttons, they eagerly lent their names to Colding-Jorgensen’s online campaign. If that request had come from some unknown entity with few historically conscious contacts, or if joining in required performing a number of challenging chores, chances are the success of that crusade would have been far less spectacular. Or perhaps the campaign received so much attention because it was noticed and further advertised by some prominent blogger or a newspaper, thus giving it exposure it might never have earned on its own. On this rather skeptical reading, the success of online political and social causes is hard to predict, let alone engineer. Policymakers, therefore, should not pay much attention to Facebook-based activism. While Facebook-based mobilization will occasionally lead to genuine social and political change, this is mostly accidental, a statistical certainty rather than a genuine achievement. With millions of groups, at least one or two of them are poised to take off. But since it’s impossible to predict which causes will work and which ones won’t, Western policymakers and donors who seek to support or even prioritize Facebook-based activism are placing a wild bet.
Another, more optimistic way to assess the growth of activism on social networks is to celebrate the ease and speed with which Facebook groups can grow and go viral. From this perspective, Colding-Jorgensen’s experiment has shown that when communication costs are low, groups can easily spring into action—a phenomenon the Internet guru Clay Shirky dubbed “ridiculously easy group forming.” (Shirky acknowledges that some “bad groups”—for example, anorexic girls seeking to impress each other with their sacrifices—can be formed ridiculously easily as well.) Proponents of this view argue that Facebook is to group formation what Red Bull is to productivity. If a nonexistent or poorly documented cause could garner the attention of 28,000 people, more important, well-documented causes—genocide in Darfur, Tibetan independence, abuses of human rights in Iran—can certainly rally millions behind them (and they do). While there are still no universal benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of such groups, the fact that they exist—pushing updates to their members, pestering them with fund-raising requests, urging them to sign a petition or two—suggests that, despite occasional embarrassing gaffes, Facebook could be a valuable resource that political activists and their Western supporters need to master. That they may not