(Ir)religiosity

I couldn’t help but recall Bonhoeffer’s notion of “cheap grace” when I read Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker on the ambivalent role of social media and social networking in activism.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.  This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism. [...]  It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. [...] Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Of course I have to agree with him, even as one who quite rightly passes as a “social media evangelist” at times.  While I am certainly not a luddite when it comes to these sort of things — I think that social media and networking serves a great, innovative, I dare say revolutionary, purpose at its best — I think it would behoove to acknowledge that technology, especially those that tend to encourage, at their worst, a dangerous type of narcissistic solipsism, always cut both ways.  I would much rather name that penchant and be mindful of it such that I can apply a healthy dose of suspicion to it as needed (which is almost constantly for me!) than to let it go completely unmitigated.

So, even though I find myself immersed in all this — very much on purpose — I still think it important to remain brutally self-critical.  And on that point I think we could use a little less cheap activism and a little more honest confrontation of socially entrenched norms and practices, to use Gladwell’s phrase.  And then maybe one day we can actually get at something Gladwell doesn’t much but is no less potent or operative — the power dynamics at work and the differential that remains largely unchallenged even when these technologies are but to good purpose.¹

Sometimes I actually wonder, in quasi-Bonhoefferian fashion, if at times no activism might actually be better than cheap activism.  It would certainly be more honest.

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1. This cuts both ways too.  On the one hand, social media seems radically democratic, allowing almost anyone the opportunity to be heard in ways that traditional mediums did not.  But on the other hand, while it may create space for the free exchange of opinions and debate, it rarely, if ever, creates the impetus for the liberative reconfiguration of power relations.  It only creates a space for that possibility to maybe be talked about.  Important, to be sure, but not enough in itself. [↩]

I like Howard Zinn.  I like him a lot.  And if you haven’t read his A People’s History of the United States you need to — right now.  It’s a great book.

Al Jazeera interviewed Zinn the other day.  Here are a few selected quotes.

“[The US] is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling - an empire that has no future … because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home. [This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now.” Read the rest of this entry »