The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [109]
Even though Facebook activism offers only a limited vision of what is really possible in the digital space, the network effect—the fact that so many people and organizations are already on Facebook—makes it hard to think outside the box. Activists can easily set up a website with better privacy defaults and a gazillion more functions, but why should they bother building it if it may fail to attract any visitors? Most campaigns have no choice but to conform to the shallowness and limitations of Facebook communications; in a tradeoff between scale and functionality, most of them choose the former. Thus, for many such campaigns, the supposed gains of digital activism are nothing but illusory: Whatever they save through their newly found ability to recruit new members, they lose in trying to make these new members act as a group—and, preferably, without giving in to social loafing. Facebook may have made finding volunteers easier, but only at the cost of having to spend more time getting those volunteers to do any work.
Furthermore, the increasingly social nature of information consumption in the digital age may result in certain causes (like those having to do with the immediate environment, one’s friends, alma mater, and so on) gaining a disproportionally higher place on one’s immediate agenda. Often this is a useful change in the focus of political activism. While many students are wasting their energy on “saving” Darfur by joining Facebook groups, their own universities are run without the scrutiny they deserve from the student body. Some kind of a balance between the global and the local is desirable, but as social networking sites inundate their members with information and suggestions carefully selected based on their demographics, location, and existing networks, it may well be that global activism is once again the aristocratic privilege of the widely traveled and widely read upper classes.
Everybody Can’t Be Che Guevara
The decentralization of political organizing may have wonderful implications for knowledge creation—Wikipedia is one example—but the reality is that decentralization itself is not a sufficient condition for successful political reform. In most cases, it’s not even a desired condition.
When every node on the network can send a message to all other nodes, confusion is the new default equilibrium condition. This is becoming obvious to anyone managing political campaigns—giving volunteers a chance to spam everyone on the list can paralyze the entire effort. One academic observer of how campaigns worked during the Iowa Presidential Primary in 2008 was shocked by the amount of mis- and over-communication experienced by their staff, noting that much of it was uncalled for and harmful and remarking that “it would have taken very peculiar priorities in activist groups or campaign organizations to generate 45 phone calls or letters in a few days to a single Goldwater supporter in 1964 or a McGovern supporter in 1972.” Not so today: It’s distressingly easy to send 450 or 4,500 emails with a click of a button.
The ease with which supporters can now be mobilized online may eventually block the campaigners’ imagination and preclude them from experimenting with more costly—but also potentially more effective—strategies. As the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, in a rather Kierkegaardian train of thought, asked the audience at F5 Expo, a Canadian technology conference, in 2010: “What would have happened to Castro if he had had Twitter and Facebook? Would he have gone to the trouble of putting together an extraordinary network that allowed him to defeat Batista?” What Gladwell seems to be saying is that, despite Facebook and Twitter’s superb ability to mobilize millions of people in a matter of