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Movement Building and Deep Change: A Call to Mobilize Strong and Weak Ties
Taj James and Marianne Manilov, The Huffington Post
Malcolm Gladwell’s recent piece in the New Yorker, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweeted”, has started a discussion about whether online social ties — because they lack depth in relationship — build movements or not.
Among those of us practicing movement building and creating deep change, the more immediate question is how both weak and strong ties are being used on the front lines of social change action today. Many readers of Gladwell’s piece object to the false choice between offline and online. So let’s not choose. Let’s talk about efforts and organizations that are using both offline and online tools to build an unprecedented movement in this unprecedented moment.
We study and practice movement building and are part of a wider community of practice. Below, we share four stories that illustrate what we’re seeing on the ground and talking about in our network. Regardless of the tools we use, what connects and inspires people are stories. Social media platforms offer new ways of engaging and sharing each other’s stories, with organizational stories, with national or global stories — yet they’re no substitute for face-to-face deep community building. Our hope is that these stories and tools are of use to those committed to the deep and high-risk social change that Gladwell rightly calls for. We welcome your comments and encourage you to let us know about other stories, experiences and ideas.
Whenever we talk about change, we are also talking about community. Large-scale change only happens when networked communities of people move together. Strong ties and relationships are built-in and maintained by the network of community.
(20 October 2010)
Shouts Banish Doubts
Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune
New research suggests one reason our political discourse is so loud and angry: Planting seeds of doubt leads people to more vigorously advocate for their cherished beliefs.
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Two years ago, faith in free-market capitalism was badly shaken when the international banking system nearly collapsed. To many, a sober re-evaluation of the government’s regulatory role seemed an inevitable response.
Instead, today’s political discourse is largely driven by the Tea Party movement, which is impassioned and vocal in its defense of unfettered free-market capitalism.
Why have so many rallied in support of a system that recent events suggest is deeply flawed? Newly published research confirms and expands upon an insight first revealed in the 1950s: If confidence in one’s core tenets becomes shaky, a common response is to proselytize all the more vigorously.
The apparent reason, according to Northwestern University researchers David Gal and Derek Rucker, is that advocacy on behalf of one’s beliefs helps banish any uncomfortable lack of certainty.
“Although it is natural to assume that a persistent and enthusiastic advocate of a belief is brimming with confidence,” they write in the journal Psychological Science, “the advocacy might in fact signal that the individual is boiling over with doubt.”
(15 October 2010)
The Persuasive Power of Swearing
PsyBlog
Light swearing at the start or end of a persuasive speech can help influence an audience.
Lack of passion can be fatal to our attempts to persuade others of our point of view. Even if all the right facts are trotted out in an intelligible order, even if the argument is unassailable, when the speaker doesn’t appear to believe it themselves, why should anyone else bother?
Show your passion, however, and people have one more emotional reason to come around to your point of view.
But how can we convince others of our conviction?
One unconventional way is by using a little light swearing. The problem is that we run the risk of losing credibility and appearing unprofessional.
To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches. The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start:
(20 October 2010)
Revolutionary politics and social networking
Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist
In a recent issue of the New Yorker Magazine, Malcolm Gladwell found fault with activism based on Twitter and Facebook. Titled Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted, it draws a contrast between the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s and more recent protests that rely heavily on social networking.
Ironically, one of the iconic images of this period was a Woolworth’s sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi on May 28, 1963 with a young Native American professor named John Salter sitting next to Black civil rights activists being assaulted by racists:
Salter describes the incident thusly:
This was the most violently attacked sit-in during the 1960s and is the most publicized. A huge mob gathered, with open police support while the three of us sat there for three hours. I was attacked with fists, brass knuckles and the broken portions of glass sugar containers, and was burned with cigarettes. I’m covered with blood and we were all covered by salt, sugar, mustard, and various other things.
John Salter goes by the name Hunter Gray nowadays. Now I don’t know if Hunter uses Twitter or Facebook, but I do know him as an enthusiastic user of Internet resources from his authoritative website http://www.hunterbear.org/ to his participation on Marxmail, a listserv I launched in 1998. Hunter also moderates at least two listservs himself, not worrying about whether this passes muster with Malcolm Gladwell.
It does seem a bit out of character for the New Yorker Magazine to be dispensing advice about how to build any kind of mass radical movement.
… Gladwell [author of the article “Small Change”] is fairly typical of the new New Yorker. Wiki reports:
Gladwell began his career at The American Spectator, a conservative monthly.[10] He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, before joining The Washington Post as a business writer in 1987.[11]
… [a sociology professor] made an observation once that has stuck with me over the years. He said that PEN-L was made to order for some 60s radical who went to graduate school and got a job as an economics professor in someplace like East Jesus, Nebraska. Without a soul to exchange ideas with at work, PEN-L becomes a crucial way to stay in touch with likeminded souls.
It was obviously the way that Hunter Gray saw the Internet. As a retired professor and longtime activist, it seemed to make perfect sense to launch a website and look for kindred spirits in mailing lists.
… I doubt that most people using Facebook or Twitter to publicize one struggle or another view these products as a substitute for traditional organizing. Gladwell simply does not get why they are resorting to such technologies. As A.J. Liebling once said, freedom of the press belongs to those who can buy one. In an age of growing corporate control and monopolization, the Internet provides an alternative to the ruling class’s political agenda.
The Internet has as revolutionary a potential as the Gutenberg press had in the 1600s. Back then a press could be used to churn out tracts that the Protestant rebels could use against the Catholic Church and its allies in the feudal estates. A peasant was no longer at the mercy of the clerical scribes who were the only ones who could turn out printed material approved by the Establishment.
That’s the position we are in today. We no longer are at the mercy of a crappy magazine like The New Yorker that propagandized relentlessly for the war in Iraq. Through the Internet we can spread the word without relying on the high priesthood of the corporate media, like Malcolm Gladwell, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thomas Friedman or Bob Woodward. That, I think, is what disturbs Gladwell more than anything even if he doesn’t admit it.
(17 October 2010)
