online activism

I'm still playing a bit of catch-up and just came across this excellent and thorough rebuttal by Georgia10 to Sally Kohn's op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor excoriating Millennials as a generation of individualistic, ineffective online activists.

Kohn responded to Georgia in the comments, saying (in part):

Still, I think it is critical that we place internet activism in context --- yes, valuable as one new tool in a broader toolbox of strategy but one with limitations. Mouseclicks and Facebook pages replacing door knocking and house meetings removes an important element from our political activism: relationships. Power is about relationships; and challenging power is about the ability to mobilize relationships toward a common purpose. This is what Alinsky was talking about (as Georgia10 cites); this is the lesson of every political and social movement before and after.

The emphasis here is mine because that is the crux of what is wrong with Kohn's argument. Sally is setting this up as an either/or proposition and creating a false dichotomy. There is no hard evidence showing that internet activism decreases offline activism. This is not a zero sum game in which there is a limited amount of activism and every minute spent "clicking a mouse" replaces a minute that would have been spent knocking on a door.

In fact, the opposite is true. According to a report on youth civic engagement in 2006by CIRCLE (pdf):

Internet Use and Civic Engagement

We separately asked about the frequency with which people go online, whether for news or other purposes. According to our survey, 69% of young people reported using the Internet at least a few times per week, and 41% reported using it daily. In general, those who use the Internet at least a few times per week are more engaged than those who never use it, while those who use it daily are the most engaged. For example, among those who do not use the Internet regularly, 72% are disengaged, and 23% have not participated in any civic engagement activities we measure. In contrast, among those who use the Internet daily, only 49% are disengaged, and only 10% have not engaged in any civic activities. That remains true even when we take into account the effects of education.

The term engagement here measures a variety of indicators, including voting, community service, community problem solving, boy/buycotting products, canvassing, holding political conversations and more.

Statistics aside, there is hard evidence all around us that online engagement can produce just the sort of on-the-ground, community activism that Kohn desires. In 2006, tens of thousands of young immigrants and 2nd generation Americans took to the streets to protest harsh, anti-immigrant legislation in Congress. Those mass protests, which received national attention in the media and undoubtedly played a role in beating back the Sensenbrenner Bill, were organized primarily via MySpace and text messages. Without the internet, one of the largest and most successful student protests in our recent history - and one that did not address an issue of great concern to white upper-middle class elites - would not have occurred.

In her reply to Georgia, Kohn says that we need to consider the internet in context. I couldn't agree more, I just wish she'd taken her own advice.

The Center for Community Change's Sally Kohn has a piece today about the passionate Millennial activism that is taking place online and the extent to which it happens off line.

We've kinda heard this complaint before with Thomas Friedman's Generation Q piece that slammed the Millennial Generation for not being disgusted enough by our contemporary world to take to the streets. In Mike's rebuttal of the piece and indeed many of us who spoke out against Friedman's uneducated assumptions, it isn't that Millennials aren't taking to the streets, indeed they are, they are just virtual streets

Kohn is bothered by the virtual part. She agrees that young people feel "deeply connected" with causes - things going on in Darfur, Tibet, you name it.... Bus she fears the online activism will "erode the community values [Millennials] seek"

"On the one hand, they have grown up with new technologies that have helped the world connect more easily; on the other hand, they have been raised alongside the rise of hyperindividualism in American culture that has isolated us from each other and the world around us...

But social movements are based on collective action. The American Revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and every significant social change movement in between and since has relied on community organizing, building mutually responsible communities to challenge the status quo."

Kohn says that the internets are very individualistic. Seems Kohn hasn't heard of Web 2.0. I don't know about ya'll but we are collectively communicating right here on the tubes. And this blog is fed into facebook - which if you haven't seen it is this SOCIAL networking site where all these people who went to school together, work together, or associate in the same causes collectively chill together on line.

For example, Invisible Children started out just on MySpace and Facebook, living through social networking sites, this organization brought awareness and action to a cause among an age specific group of people. Now, young people are serving to help walk these children to safe houses daily, people are donating online, showing the film, and raising awareness about something no one was talking about a few years ago.

IC isn't the only one. Save Darfur is another cause that I hardly think would have the passion and power that it does today without a mobilized group of people online. If you look at online donations on Change.org or the FB Causes application you see that Save Darfur has raised $2,657 on Change with 1997 actions and $24,000 on the Causes Application on Facebook.

Young people have a lot of power and that power can take place on-line or off, each action is just as valid and just as powerful and appreciated. No one should be allowed to get away with diminishing that.

I'm sitting in on a panel entitled "Making Onffline Magic: Converting Online Friends to Activists on the Ground." The Panelists are:

• Joe Green - Facebook Causes
• Austin Walne - Fred Thompson Campaign
• Cyrus Krohn - RNC eCampaigns
• Matt Ewing - MoveOn

I'm running a similar panel at Netroots Nation, so I'm here taking notes (aka stealing good ideas for Austin).

Joe Green says - Social Networks are important because there is "peer-verified identity." Took away the anonymity of traditional internet interaction. The social graph, and how social networks like Facebook map the social graph, is the catalyst for moving online action offline and vice versa.

Austin Walne says - On campaigns, you always need to be giving volunteers new things to do otherwise they will lose interest. Like offline, must have a way to keep the hard core activists busy and find way to move the casual supporter into the network. Online work makes it easier to find that casual supporter and engage them. Power of Facebook is in 1-1 interaction, not mass communication. Need to recognize and work within those bounds.

Cyrus Krohn says - Started Slate.com and founded The Well. Saw the power of communities to self organize online.

Matt Ewing says - Trying to scale "tried and true" tactics online. Trained activists to do press-conferences on the release of an Iraq report. What are the ways that you can take advantage of traditional tactics and use the internet to take them to scale. Must view this as you providing people a service. Learn to let go - with scale organizations must also lose control.
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Q&A:

Joe Green - Online activism can remove some of the social pressures associated with activism (phone banking in which the user enters their own number into a website which then auto-dials people on their behalf).

Cyrus Krohn - offline impact of online delivery of materials is underestimated. If you are putting out flyers via PDF, you are pushing costs out to those supporters. At scale, that is a huge money saver. Old school but effective.

Matt Ewing - MoveOn's model is more sustainable than a campaign and flexible. They are not trying to force anything on their members, they are trying to find out what their members already want to do and then facilitate that action on a mass scale.

Matt Ewing - MoveOn has on-the-ground councils. They invest in those people and then can leverage them to increase energy and interest to kick-start the online components. Old school but effective.

Matt Ewing - How do you bring people up from casual participants to hardcore activists? It's just good organizing. Providing a wide leadership ladder to move up. Make it easy/efficient/engaging to move people up.

Joe Green - Key to "moving people up" online is the friendship networks - giving them someone to be accountable to. That shows them that there time is valued and valuable. Show them how and why what they are doing is important and have both campaign higher-ups and friends express that to them. Online doesn't yet have as good a way to do this as offline organizing.

Cyrus Krohn - good testing to tell you who is doing what to create a model for "what the next step is" for any given level of activists.

Matt Ewing - agrees wth Cyrus. That kind of database knowledge is key.

Austin Walne and Joe Green - The internet is not magic (damn!). It takes work and smart organizing.

Audience - great question about how we can overcome over-saturation in the online activism market (eg. Facebook Causes/Groups).

Joe Green - Exploring slightly higher barriers to entry or ways to promote more action. His example is requiring members to do a specific action (donate, write a letter, etc.) or risk being thrown out the group.

Matt Ewing - the power of online isn't in getting the apathetic to care it's in getting the people who care, but don't know what to do, an avenue for participation.

Joe Green - total apathy is a myth. You just need to ask someone to participate enough times. Example - Plaxo and Facebook growth: if enough people ask, critical mass gets high enough that everyone starts to participate.

Cyrus Krohn - Open question not addressed here is Mobile, where you are totally merging the online and offline. Getting that to work is the next big thing.

Just a thought: I was reading through a post about the new Change.org App and Petitions Application on FaceBook and my mind wandered to the questions of effectiveness and impact and youth engagement.

I've read a variety of journalists, pundits and even activists questioning the utility of FaceBook organizing . . . is it effective . . . are young people gaining a false sense of participation, believing they are changing something when all they are doing is building their "friend" list, etc.?

This strikes me as rather the wrong way to think of it. Young people - or really FaceBook users - have shown a willingness to do things online for the issues they believe in. Don't the burdens of effectiveness, utility, and social impact rest with the organizations creating those applications? The growth of the Causes App shows that young people will use these tools, it's up to the organizations to actually put some thought into what functionality will help accomplish their policy goals and then incorporate that FaceBook activism into a larger strategy.