Hi Mike, Glad you kept on reading :) ... It's the academic style to put out the opposing case and then pick it apart.
I have no answer concerning your general point about FB as a platform for social movements/change... I think that it has to be seen as a tool/extension/enabler/capacitator... Something that is part of the process but not the process itself and the specific role that it does or can play depends very much on the context, the issue, the participants... One thing I realized when we were in China was how very very smart the Chinese authorities were in managing social processes, including their online instantiations. The Chinese Revolution and then the on-going role of the Communist Party in China is a manifestation of a deep (and historically based) understanding of social movements and social processes--and that is a major reason that China has managed to evolve as it has over the last decade or so including the expansion (and overall State "management") of the Internet. As Mao said (and as they deeply understand) one spark can start a prairie fire, but not all sparks will have that result. Mike -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Friday, February 11, 2011 11:10 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: FW: Blogpost: Immiserating the Poor: We Have AnApp For That (Social Media vs. the iPhone in Egypt and aKenyan slum) Mike Gurstein wrote: > http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/immiserating-the-poor-we-have > -an-app-for-that-social-media-vs-the-iphone-in-egypt-and-a-kenyan-slum > / I was about to reply and slag you, Mike, for touting this as an example of "wondrous" community IT, as it appears to me that what the project is doing is just removing "friction" from a privatized market in a necessity of life. So I was happy to read further and find: The fundamental problem with all of this comes in the failure to distinguish between the residents of Kibera as consumers using their cell phones and this "shiny app" to pursue their individual consumer dreams, and the residents of Kibera as citizens who could and should be insisting on the availability of water as a right of residence or alternatively developing some community based collaborative approach to responding to the water crisis. Right. The situation reminds me of the Onion piece on private action against the inbound earth-shattering asteroid. On an only tangentially related note, I mentioned that I had looked (briefly) at Facebook and found that there were already multiple groups targeting corporate personhood. I occurs to me that contrary to the optimism of (the most simplistic version of) Metcalf's law, too many connections lead to one of several strategies to cope. One of those is balkanization -- math guys would call it partitioning -- such that possible connections are rejected, existing one deleted and new ones accepted on increasingly trivial criteria or increasingly automated rules. With the potential for a million (or even a couple of thousand) putative "friends" on a "social medium", there's no way to evaluate them substantively or reflectively. So people who might be unified in their support of (say) single-payer medicine are partitioned into those who like Metallica, those who smoke pot, vegetarians, those who use good grammar, those who don't, pre-, mid- and post-trib Christians, atheists etc. etc. (Okay, dumb example, but you get the idea...) This turns my thoughts back to the review of Lakoff's book that I posted a while back. If the objectives of serious, reality-based, empathetic thought can be realized only by capturing the minds of a large fraction of a population -- of the electorate; of people under 30; of retired progressives; of Republicans who lack health insurance -- then what are our possible strategies? Are we limited to methods the use of which violates the integrity we claim to evince and represent? What are the chances for introjecting a meme into a "social media" environment that will become viral if dozens of major corporations drown it out with heavily subsidized, carefully calculated "social media strategy"? - Mike PS: It's 20F tonight but the tomato plants in my micro-greenhouse have blossoms. And 50 snow buntings have been hanging out in our back yard. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
