“Most people who use the Internet seem take its nature and characteristics for granted, like we take air and water for granted. Your relationship with air and water — what you can do with it or within it — is for all practical purposes an unchanging fact of nature. What you can or cannot do with or on the Internet, however, is the result of specific decisions and actions by individual human beings who hold different motivations — be they political, cultural, social, academic, economic, or business motives. The actions themselves take different forms: programming, engineering, design, business, or legislative. These decisions and actions determine things like how much privacy you have, how easily your digital activities can be tracked and by whom, how your online identity relates to your offline identity, and to what extent you can have more than one online persona.”
Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker
Long, but very worth a read. An in depth examination of why comparisons to the civil rights movement really don’t have calls for current social media activism, especially with “high risk” activism.
One of the things I took away from this is the usefulness of “strong-tie” networks, that is people you actually know in person. I mean, I knew that most of my facebook, twitter, and online (only) friends would count as weak tie friends, or what we used to call acquaintances. Now not all of them are, but most would count as such. As such it’s clear that social media is built around weak ties, as it helps them monetize you better (to be cynical), or at least it offers “rewards” for keeping over-large sets of connections.
The take away is that social media activism helps with status quo issues. If that’s enough for you, great. But for activism that changes the world, you need strong ties, and those only seem to come from centralized, organized institutions and movements.
