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This article on the New Yorker points out some of the misgivings I have about social activism rather convincingly: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all I'm not sure I agree with the strongest claims of the article (i.e., that networks function badly in high-risk situations and you need hierarchy to operate well in such scenarios) but the points made about strong and weak ties, and about thresholds of motivation and sacrifice are, I think, essentially true. The fact that this so-called social activism seems to have a lot of "philanthropic" backing, people meddling from abroad knowing nothing about the situation, etc, also tends to predispose me against it, while keeping in mind that, as the article says itself, we shouldn't take dogmatic positions on tools. Finally, the fact is, these tools are, for the time being and in spite of projects like Diaspora or status.net, thoroughly centralised. They run on infrastructure owned by capitalists, some of which have unsettling connections to national security apparats. So far these tools have been, in my view, mildly useful for disseminating information and perhaps help coordinate people with existing strong ties, but there are serious dangers: traffic and social network analysis could get a lot of people into a lot of trouble one of these days, if they are real activists taking real risks. There's growing literature on the topic of deanonymisation: a sufficient amount of data, even when there are no names in it, can be used to find out what the real identity of a certain user is. If I remember correctly, two data points such as post code and birthday would uniquely identify over 80% of people in the US. Anyway, I think this is something worth thinking of before it becomes a real issue for actual movements (at this point I don't think any serious movement is using these tools as primary means of coordination). --David. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
