Online social networks as activism tools
Last week I went to an interesting event hosted by ONE/Northwest, about the potential usefulness of online social networks to activist groups. Jon Stahl liveblogged the occasion, and his post functions as a handy minutes of the meeting.
I hadn't really taken the idea seriously before hearing these speakers. I mean, unlike about a third of the people in the room, I'm pretty familiar with online social networks, and find them sometimes useful and sometimes entertaining, but I didn't think they had any value to a campaign. Some of the speakers convinced me that I had been missing important things. Two realisations stand out in particular:
I had considered the great ease with which one can effectively just tick a box and say "I support cause XYZ" to be a serious limitation, because it renders it essentially meaningless. Going around knocking on doors to canvas people to vote for your candidate shows a serious commitment, whereas joining the "Barack Obama for President 2008" Facebook group doesn't really prove anything. But what I've only recently realised is that there is still some value in a tide of people merely saying "I support XYZ".
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, in the context of how concern about global warming has very recently gone from a fringe "Lisa Simpson" issue to something pretty mainstream. Clearly Al Gore deserves some of the credit there, but I think a lot of people go too far in simply positing that "An Inconvenient Truth" was so powerful that it's changed majority opinion alone. I think a major factor has simply been that the minority of people concerned about the issue reached a critical mass, and suddenly a lot of people who hadn't necessarily cared or taken it seriously noticed that a lot of their friends did. Thus the issue went from fringe to respectable, fairly quickly because it suddenly crossed a threshold. From a political organiser's perspective, anything that speeds this transition is hugely useful - fringe issues are a constant battle to get any action on, but once something has been mainstreamed politicians start falling over each other to be seen to do something about it.
The other potential use comes from a story that Alex Steffen of WorldChanging told. The gist was that to spike his book's standing in Amazon's bestseller list, he used multiple online channels (blogs, social networks, etc) to organise as many of its potential purchasers as possible to pre-order or buy it on release day. Doing this allowed him to turn modest initial sales into a #11 placement on Amazon's list, which in turn helped persuade various bigtime bricks & mortar retailers to stock it. The general message, from my point of view, was that all of these online tools together are a pretty powerful way to co-ordinate people to all do something at the right moment. That something need not necessarily be buying a book-for instance, messages that spread fast peer-to-peer can be a way of getting everyone who cares to write to their senator the day before a key vote, etc.
I hadn't really taken the idea seriously before hearing these speakers. I mean, unlike about a third of the people in the room, I'm pretty familiar with online social networks, and find them sometimes useful and sometimes entertaining, but I didn't think they had any value to a campaign. Some of the speakers convinced me that I had been missing important things. Two realisations stand out in particular:
I had considered the great ease with which one can effectively just tick a box and say "I support cause XYZ" to be a serious limitation, because it renders it essentially meaningless. Going around knocking on doors to canvas people to vote for your candidate shows a serious commitment, whereas joining the "Barack Obama for President 2008" Facebook group doesn't really prove anything. But what I've only recently realised is that there is still some value in a tide of people merely saying "I support XYZ".
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, in the context of how concern about global warming has very recently gone from a fringe "Lisa Simpson" issue to something pretty mainstream. Clearly Al Gore deserves some of the credit there, but I think a lot of people go too far in simply positing that "An Inconvenient Truth" was so powerful that it's changed majority opinion alone. I think a major factor has simply been that the minority of people concerned about the issue reached a critical mass, and suddenly a lot of people who hadn't necessarily cared or taken it seriously noticed that a lot of their friends did. Thus the issue went from fringe to respectable, fairly quickly because it suddenly crossed a threshold. From a political organiser's perspective, anything that speeds this transition is hugely useful - fringe issues are a constant battle to get any action on, but once something has been mainstreamed politicians start falling over each other to be seen to do something about it.
The other potential use comes from a story that Alex Steffen of WorldChanging told. The gist was that to spike his book's standing in Amazon's bestseller list, he used multiple online channels (blogs, social networks, etc) to organise as many of its potential purchasers as possible to pre-order or buy it on release day. Doing this allowed him to turn modest initial sales into a #11 placement on Amazon's list, which in turn helped persuade various bigtime bricks & mortar retailers to stock it. The general message, from my point of view, was that all of these online tools together are a pretty powerful way to co-ordinate people to all do something at the right moment. That something need not necessarily be buying a book-for instance, messages that spread fast peer-to-peer can be a way of getting everyone who cares to write to their senator the day before a key vote, etc.