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My friend, and master activist/organizer, Jake Kaskey wrote recently about the issue of progressives vs conservatives and organizing in the Social Media realm. The post is linked below and it is a good read, but it also accentuates for me some questions that have been on my mind for some time now. Six weeks or so ago, I was just a happy blogger/activist turning out y thoughts and ideas , and a friend even commented that I had really found my voice. And then the Health Care debate )or debacle depending upon your perspective) exploded, and I haven’t been the same since. I remember the experience of the day after the Bush/Kerry election of feeling utterly and completely abandoned and let down by MoveOn, Kerry, and the whole of the democratic process, and I’m close to having sunk to that level of “political despair.” And now, I’ve been seeing estimates that democrats are likely to lose big in the 2010 midterm elections, and I wonder what the @#%! are we doing all of this for? So today, I want to ask, what is the point of organizing- or how do we measure the success of organizing- when it doesn’t lead to any real change? OK, so that is no small question to put out there, but there it is.

Jake comments:

However, I tend to see a difference between blogs and social media-  although there’s much overlap, there’s thousands upon thousands of people engaging on social media that may not be involved with or writing for blogs at the same level of engagement.

From my perspective, I see this in several ways. There has been a natural progression from using the blog as a method for dialogue, to the use of the microblog as a primary vehicle for that dialogue. Four or five years ago, bloggers sought to build their own community of readers and comments by providing a space for a network of people to grow. This notion of individual communities made sense, and individuals could aggregate their various communities together in Google Reader to some degree, but they remained in a very real way, separate communities. Platforms like FriendFeed, Facebook, and especially Twitter provided the community and invited people to do their sharing, but in smaller chunks that full blog posts, sot hat today, The Facebook Wall and Twitter are the types of spaces where people comment upon each other’s ideas and share a dialogue. Unlike an old fashioned blog “community” that may grow slowly over time, networks of friends (or followers in Twitter) can expand rapidly. Individuals who may never have crossed paths end up doing so because of the ways these platforms allow the sharing of ideas. But, is this organizing? Is it adding to the discourse?? Or are we merely counting  (and recounting) the folks that are already on one side of an issue or another? In other words, as Jake watches the #p2 hashtag explode, what does that really mean? Jakes asks the same thing in a way:

Is Tweetprogress a step in this direction? Perhaps.  As of this writing over 3200 people have joined the network.  Has anything come from it?  Not that I can tell.  Will something come from it?  Maybe.  Is this another example of herd mentality– joining up as you see your friends and follwers doing the same (as I did)— or is this really a meaningful way to organize ourselves in one centralized place to affect change?

I tend to think is is just herd mentality. I don’t doubt that for the individuals, involved (all 3200) of them, it means something personally, but does it happen so that people can feel connected or so that through that connectedness, real change can be made possible?

Surrounding the Iranian election, there were several movements on Twitter that many participated in such as changing your locale to Tehran, or coloring your profile picture green. The first was intended to make it difficult for the Iranian authorities to find the real Iranian Twitterers, and to upset  the crackdown on the information leak out of Iran. The second was to demonstrate solidarity, and it is possible today, months after, to still find folks who are clearly American, listed as residing in Tehran or using green-tinted images. I took my green pic down when a new fad hit: the addition of a small rainbow in the bottom right corner of your pic. Reminds me of the scene in WALL-E where everyone’s outfits change from blue to red (or is it red to blue?). Was this a political reference I didn’t grasp when I first saw the film?

But to what end, do we do these things? What do we expect the outcomes to be, and how do we measure how successful we are being? Which brings me back to the Health Care fiasco, and the organizing that led to Obama’s successful win. And what appears to be pushing us towards the return of conservative control in the 2010 and 2012 elections. I am not suggesting that a measurable outcome is required before any action, and I realize that sometimes we organize and hope for the best and need to settle for however much we achieve. But are we organizing to be organized and feel as if we are doing our part, or is our goal to actively create change that improves things for everyone?

I am of the mind that one-on-one dialogues are a critical aspect of creating change. When I talk to my neighbor, the grocery store clerk, a coworker, a a friend’s friend in a Facebook thread, these are the spaces where changed ideas and attitudes spark changes in actions. Over the past few days, I’ve been involved with just such a discussion on Facebook with two friends of a friend of mine about Health Care reform. At least one of these individuals is pretty conservative (as an aside, I have come to realize just how isolated I am among like-minded people. I can only name one person I would call a friend who is a conservative. I’d like to believe that I am a person who celebrates diversity, but among my friends, there is not much diversity in political or social views) and I had commented that it was impossible to know how the American people really feel about Health Care reform because there have been so many lies and misinformation spread, it isn’t possible to determine how much these have impacted the discourse. To which the conservative guy commented, that he had no idea what I meant by lies and misinformation. That will pretty much bring that dialogue to an end, because how can we really have a conversation when we aren’t living in the same reality? Death Panels, Death books, and health care as a plot to kill Republicans: when these are treated as real discourse, there is no where for a conversation to go, at least not towards an end point where two people leave that exchange with a better understanding of the other’s viewpoint and some sense of a changed attitude.

Maybe I’m talking in circles and I am actually going nuts, but I’m beginning to wonder if social media hinders our inability to affect real change by adding only to the noise out there, rather than affect the real content of the dialogue. Do we generate activity and exchange that parades as useful, but in reality has little or no impact?

The Herd Mentality- or Actual Organizing on the Left? « JakeKaskey.com – Activism, Advocacy and Social Media.