Would Goebbels Have liked the Web?

You bet.

In a review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion and A. Ross Johnson's Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, James Murphy in the Times Literay Supplement (July 8, 2011) writes:

Tools of mass connectivity may empower the multitude, but Goebbels, who knew a lot about crowds, would have welcomed them.

He's right. Goebbels the master propagandist would have loved to twist the world, and the word, in the image of his warped mind using social networks.

There is also no question authoritarian regimes don't hesitate to outlaw, spy on, block or otherwise interfere with troublesome civic discourse especially today on the internet.

The disquieting trend, though, is that Western democracies are now grumbling more loudly about needing greater control over how the social web is used as mechanism for social organization.

During the summer riots in the U.K. prime minister David Cameron, according to the Guardian, speculated (in one of the silliest and most troublesome declarations coming out of the riots in the U.K.),

(T)hat Facebook, Twitter and Research in Motion (Rim), the maker of BlackBerry devices, should take more responsibility for content posted on their networks, warning the government would look to ban people from major social networks if they were suspected of inciting violence online.

Shortly afterwards, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan received stiff (too stiff?) four-year sentences for using Facebook to organize riots. And a week later the British government summoned the heads of three companies to a meeting with home secretary Theresa May "to discuss ways to prevent social media from being used to coordinate criminal activity".

We're in dangerous territory here. The problem comes with defining "inciting violence" and "criminal activity" on the social web. The same words have been used again and again by authoritarian regimes, police forces,  and otherwise democratic governments facing social dissent to justify unlawful repression of legitimate opposition whether in the streets or more recently on the social web. This includes even the most socially stable of countries, Canada, which went a bit overboard in its arrests of protestors during the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto. Certainly, the same words were used by governments in Tunisia and Egypt to clamp down on web-based protests, and the demonstrations that followed.

Finding the right balance between preventing and prosecuting irresponsible juvenile destruction and allowing political and social dissidence - and free association to act on it as civil disobedience - is tough.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reminds us that:

The term ‘civil disobedience’ was coined by Henry David Thoreau in his 1848 essay to describe his refusal to pay the state poll tax implemented by the American government to prosecute a war in Mexico and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. In his essay, Thoreau observes that only a very few people – heroes, martyrs, patriots, reformers in the best sense – serve their society with their consciences, and so necessarily resist society for the most part, and are commonly treated by it as enemies. Thoreau, for his part, spent time in jail for his protest. Many after him have proudly identified their protests as acts of civil disobedience and have been treated by their societies – sometimes temporarily, sometimes indefinitely – as its enemies.

IMHO . . . governments should ask anyone - like Britain's home secretary - charged with reviewing the social web's role in dissent and "violence" or with defining "responsibility for content posted on their networks" to mistrust their own propensity to control.

The value the social web brings as a platform for civic discourse and valid and tolerable dissent is greater than the danger of its use for criminal activity. The danger of governments going too far - either wilfully or inadvertently - and tipping towards smothering those who "serve society with their conscience" is far greater (and with ample historic precedents) than the cost of occasional juvenile misuse.

Curated Activism Links (2)

Another in a series on social web militancy . . .

Avaaz has been receiving a lot of attention as a platform for organizing social and political activism. Naturally, as with activist Facebook pages, questions are raised and doubts expressed about its value in actually moving people to do something other than click support or defiance.

In The Guardian, Patrick Kingsley asks the question whether Avaaz is a midwife of activism or just another way for people to feel good while letting others take transformative action,

So clicktivism – as Avaaz's brand of online activism is sometimes known – is easy. So easy, in fact, that it often gets a bad press. Cynics argue that signing an online petition, like joining a Facebook group, takes mere seconds, achieves little, and doesn't encourage clicktivists to engage properly with the issues concerned . . . But Avaaz begs to differ. It argues that its work has both greatly engaged the public, and had comprehensive effects that extend far beyond cyberspace.

My Comment . . . Avaaz often works simply because its campaigns are meticulously organized to provide people with a means of moving to action, even if the action is just a bit of street theatre.

Not all advocacy is of the let's-oppose-anything-corporate/mainstream variety. Politicians in steadily incrasing numbers are using social web tools to move consitutents to get behind an idea, policy or candidate.

The title of a USA Today article may be a breathless 'Congress quick to adopt social media tools' (adoption rates have hardly been 'quick'), but it attests to the ease with which social tools can be used for moving ideas forward. It reports on a study out of the Congressional Management Foundation which concludes that "Congessional staff feel the benefits of using social media outweigh the risks."

In the same vein, Zachary Sniderman in Mashable also offers this:

"Social media, and particularly Twitter, have become a type of soapbox in America, on which many politicians are able to speak directly to their constituents."

My Comment . . . If Twitter is considered a useful soapbox for the fulminations of politicians, hoping to arouse constituents, then there is no reason to think it can't serve the same purpose for social activists. 

Facebook Users More Politically Active

More on linking social web engagement and activism . . .

In the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project's study called 'Social networking sites and our lives', the researchers found the following:

Compared with other internet users, and users of other SNS platforms, a Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day was an additional two and half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone on their vote, and an additional 43% more likely to have said they would vote.

Rack another one up for those (okay me . . . but that lacks humility) who argue that the underlying dynamics of social networks are conducive to increased civic engagement rather than distractions from it.

Curated Activism Links

I bookmark a lot of articles, posts, video clips and infographics about web activism. Although I tweet the links regularly, in the future I will do some ad hoc curation and provide links to the most interesting (defined solely subjectively) here at The Intangibles.

For this week, in reverse chronological order:

A piece in the New York Times . . . about Change.org, a platform for organizing social change, raises a question I talked about in my presentation to NXNEi this year:

In fact, the growth of Change.org — and other online social activism groups like Avaaz.org and Signon.org, a service created by the founders of MoveOn.org — goes to the heart of a longstanding debate among activists and researchers: How powerful is online activism?

My comment . . . As I said in a presentation I gave to NXNEi conference a few weeks ago, don't ever underestimate where even the 'easisest' form of social activism can go in the hands of a smart organizer.

From the folks at TNW . . . come some examples of how people pissed off at the Murdoch phone hacking scandal took their displeasure to the social "streets", including a Twitter campaign at Follow the Money which automated the act of individuals sending tweets about companies who advertise on News of the World and 160,000 or so messages opposing the BSkyB takeover by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation sent to the British government.

My comment . . . even simple campaigns provide evidence public displeasure and we all know who are most concerned about ideas trending in the demos: media and politicians.

This comment from Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet & American Life Project . . . (in a story at Miller -McCune captures better than I could a personal belief that:

The theory and potential threats that the use of social media were thought to be bringing to politics — pulling people away from real friendships, pulling them away from their communities, distracting them, pulling people into cocooned spaces where they’re not encountering different views — all of that is not sustained in the work that we’ve done.

My comment . . . the kids are going to be alright.

Google+ is - Well - a Plus

Boy do social web natives draw the knives quickly when it comes to Google and Facebook. Google+ hasn't even launched yet but the judgments have come in short order. Right off the bat I want to ask the question Could we be sacrificing reflection, analysis and context simply for speed? But that's for another post.

Right now I think we should be willing to forget 'Wave' and 'Buzz' and give a little credit to Google for - perhaps - starting to get at least part of this social network thing right.   

Not having been invited into the Google+ corona I am for the moment on the outside looking in. But here's a few unbiased and admittedly speculative observations about Google+ based on a tour of the demo.

Google+ 'Circles' will allow you to share specific information with selected groups of people. For organizations which slice and dice their stakeholders into categories in order to tailor communications, this could be a way of structuring a social network to spark conversation and cement relationships. Natalie Bourre, founder of Marketing 4 Health Inc., points out that pharmaceutical companies for example, under the severest restrictions for direct to consumer and direct to patient, might create 'circles' of patients within closed networks. And, I would add, these social circles can take advantage of the user generation, visual, linking and speed elements not usually associated with online patient communities.

As I understand it from this Mashable article, Google+ 'Sparks' is "a recommendation engine for finding interesting content . . . a collection of articles, videos, photos and other content grouped by interest."  Whenever I hear the concept "recommendation engine" I think of promoted tweets and Facebook ads and their ability to target people and interests.

And then there is the group and video chat functions which could take the Facebook wall to a new level allowing people to self-organize online imaged group personal conversation. Companies could use the functions for stakeholder or community meetings, and activists for planning and organizing group education, proselytizing and action.

One final comment . . . sure, it will take a hell of lot to unseat Facebook as the king of social networks. But that doesn't mean that a new social platform from the mighty Google can't make a useful, important (and yes profitable) contribution to the socialization of relationships, marketing and group dynamics.