I get a lot of invitations via Facebook. That doesn’t make me cool. It’s just part and parcel with doing what I do, which is writing about performing arts. I use Facebook to follow a lot of companies, and I’m “friends” with a lot of artists all over the place, which means that I get added to their invites. For instance, a while back, as I recall, a Romanian-American choreographer named Cosmin Manolescu invited me a dance festival in, I think, Ljubljana. I remember this because I looked it up, idly thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if I could actually go,” before politely marking “no” on the invite.
Generally speaking, I only even check my invites when the little count in the upper right of Facebook hits around 20, which usually takes about five days. Then I go through and check who invited me. I guess I have a decent memory, because four out of five times this means I know where the event is probably taking place (is it is someone in Seattle, New York, or somewhere else?).
If not, I check a little deeper. Events I am already going to I mark “yes,” events I might go to or that I want to remember for a practical reason, I mark “maybe.” The “maybe” category I use, among other things, to keep track of what’s going on in Seattle so I can try to preview shows. Facebook is good for this sort of thing. I’m not fancy enough a writer–nor are all artists organized enough–to ensure that I get press releases for everything. So I use Facebook to be proactive.
Anyway, I guess this means I’m using Facebook wrong, or not proactively enough. I’m being too passive (despite being a Facebook addict), because I really could be missing something important. For instance, if I was Egyptian, I could have missed the invite to the revolution. Shame on me!
Normally here at TSB we stick to things that are very Seattle-centric, but since I’m an editor here I’m going to bend the rules a bit and venture further afoot: in this case, into the weird, self-absorbed world of media (and social media in particular), and the weird way we let these tendencies shape our perceptions of the world. The reason? I’ve been reading about the “Facebook Revolution” in Egypt, and it’s actually getting annoying.
The background is really this: back in October, The New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell, a writer who’s made an astounding career repackaging other people’s research into digestible nuggets of counter-intuitive wisdom, wrote a much commented on story arguing that social networks create a certain sort of weak or “soft” network, which is good at doing something a weak network would be good at it. Someone steal your cell phone? Send your number to all your Facebook friends to have them call it and irritate the thief who’s using it, until you finish disconnecting the service. That sort of thing.
This Gladwell contrasts with what he clearly intends to be more meaningful sorts of networks. Strong networks, forged in the real world. He begins with the story of the four black college students who, in 1960, protested segregation by sitting down and demanding to be served in the whites’ section of the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. It was one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement. This level of commitment and risk, Gladwell argues, could never have come about through soft social networks.
Fast forward four months and Gladwell is taking his lumps from every direction. See, the American media has dubbed the recent actions in Egypt, which led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak and the end of his thirty-year dictatorship, a triumph of social media technology. Gladwell himself stepped in a few days before Mubarak was ushered from power in a military coup on The New Yorker‘s website, arguing that he was right all along, in a story provocatively titled, “Does Egypt Need Twitter?” (Answer per Gladwell: No.)
I first caught wind of the anti-Gladwell backlash when Paul Constant over at the Slog went after Gladwell in what struck more than a few readers as a potentially homophobic–or at least sexist–critique, after declaring, “Malcolm Gladwell is wrong.” Now the issue is all over the blogosphere. Some people think Gladwell’s right, some people think he’s wrong. (If you want to exhaustively read up on what everyone else things, just Google it.) Here’s what I think.
My first response is–and here I might be channeling The Stranger‘s own Charles Mudede, I don’t know if he’s brought this up yet, but if not he should–that it’s an amazingly Western-centric view of what’s happening in Egypt. I mean, thank God we’ve found a way to make their amazing acts of courage about us. Stupid, benighted, medieval Muslims! Thank God American capitalism existed so that an oddly Chauncey Gardner-esque social misfit from Harvard (seriously, read The New Yorker‘s profile–Zuckerberg is shockingly not there; the story of how he was surprised that a gay man might not want to come out to his family via Facebook is priceless and the sine qua non of our era) could create a time-sucking river of links, videos, and status updates from which Egyptians only apparently recently learned that their president was a corrupt dictator, surrounded by a kleptocracy that was impoverishing the nation and stealing the future from the youth. I mean, it may not be the liberation of Buchenwald, but at least we’re still there.
Really, far from “mincing and pouting,” Gladwell was being completely straightforward and correct when he pointed out:
People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years—and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.
And he’s definitely correct at the beginning when he writes:
We now believe that the “how” of a communicative act is of huge importance. We would say that Mao posted that power comes from the barrel of a gun on his Facebook page, or we would say that he blogged about gun barrels on Tumblr—and eventually, as the apostles of new media wrestled with the implications of his comments, the verb would come to completely overcome the noun, the part about the gun would be forgotten…
And here’s the real kicker–I don’t like Malcolm Gladwell very much. It’s not always that I think he’s wrong. Sometimes he has very good points. They’re just not his (and to be fair, he cites whose they are). Gladwell specializes in a sort of Popular Mechanics for academic research, repackaging sometimes years–even decades–of academic study into a social critique that exists primarily to posit that solid evidence suggests prevailing wisdom is wrong. He’s like Thomas Friedman, another writer who’s made a career of never having a genuine insight of his own, except that, unlike Friedman, Gladwell actually does research beyond fanboying whatever hip new thing he just came across.
But Gladwell’s take on social networking and its relationship to active social change actually seemed somewhat novel, and I respected him making the point. Go figure that this is the piece that everyone wants to tar and feather him for. Because he was right then, and he’s still right now.
This is the point I was making at the beginning. There’s a difference between the dissemination of information–which Facebook and other social media certainly facilitated in this case–and bringing hundreds of thousands of people together for a peaceful revolution. People who needed to know where to go and when to get there relied on the Facebook invite, but by that point they’d already checked “yes.” And they meant it. I sincerely doubt that simply receiving the invite was what got them to show up for the revolution. That was something different for everybody, and–this might also be a shock for many Americans–probably not so instantaneous. The revolution wasn’t a flash mob. It didn’t appear out of thin air, as an article in The New York Times–which ironically purports to further the social media revolution meme–makes clear.
Quite the opposite of a completely spontaneously revolt, it turns out that the youthful activists we heard so much about, who helped organize the protests in Tahrir Square, spent years preparing. They started in 2005. They studied the work of American social activists. They traveled to Serbia to workshop with the leaders of the youth movement that overthrew ethno-fascist Slobodan Milosevic. The coordinated with existing groups, including unions, and staged several protests that were brutally suppressed before finally coordinating what happened in the last few weeks. And over the last six years, members were arrested and tortured on several occasions–continually facing threats to life and well-being for six years–yet persisted until the beginning of the amazing last few weeks, which was tied to an existing day of political commemoration dating back to colonial era atrocities. Oh, and when Mubarak’s goons descended on them, who organized the defense? The Muslim Brotherhood–an eighty-year-old network that persisted despite consistent government suppression, and soccer fans with a history of collectively screwing with the police. Hard networks, in other words. Just like Gladwell talked about.
But here’s the other thing, the reason I find myself so irritated by the prevailing narrative, and I guess this is how this comes back to me being an arts writer. I may not be an expert on international politics, or the tactics of social revolution, but I do spend a lot of time dealing with stories. People like stories; culture itself is the set of stories that explain how a society gets from one point to another through time. And stories tell us a lot about the people who tell them. This case is no different.
One of the things I’ve noticed about we Americans is that we love stories about the strength of individuals, because we love the thought that anyone can do anything. We tell our children that they can grow up to be the president or an astronaut or a billionaire tech mogul or whatever really cool and amazing thing they want to be. And we believe it, even though the vast majority of us will never do anything so amazing. Indeed, many of us will wind up working awful, dead-end jobs at ruthless corporations that undervalue our contributions and destroy our communities through low pay and low benefits. In fact, part of the reason Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and so many other service sector jobs are so awful is precisely because we tend to think we can do better, rather than the more reasonable proposition than what we actually have to do shouldn’t be so awful. Hence the moral opposition to estate taxes the vast majority of opponents would never have to pay (and which more than a few “victims” of support).
We love our Horatio Alger stories, in other words, and we constantly tell ourselves stories about the amazing, heroic things we (well, not most of us, but someone who’s just like us) do. In war films, and little-guy taking on the world movies. We love both movies in which down-home people from the Midwest go to New York and ascend the social ladder through pluck and wits alone, as well as films in which those same sorts of people–now recast as snobs–go to the Midwest and discover how fulfilling small town values are, and choose a small, meaningful life of hard work and an honest paycheck over glamour and money.
Of course, no matter which way the person’s moving through society, it requires a democratizing principal to identify with them. This is the other part of it. We’re all equally potentially capable of being uniquely amazing, but God help you if you want to be better than anyone else. Holly Golightly is a skank willing to trade her considerable…er, endowments for money, who can only be saved by a gigolo with a heart of gold who convinces her of the value of true love (a cinematic departure from Truman Capote’s novella). As Thomas Fairchild puts it in Sabrina, “The papers would have said how fine and democratic for a Larrabee to marry the chauffeur’s daughter. But would they praise the chauffeur’s daughter? No.” Unless, of course, she was, say, bringing down-home Texan sass to Washington, DC.
We tell stories about a democratic society, in other words, in which people can be whatever they choose, assuming it’s the right choice, and we invite ourselves to imagine doing so far more consistently in our stories than we allow ourselves to do wrong or cowardly or–God forbid–morally unclear acts. Sophie’s Choice isn’t an American story.
My personal favorite example of this comes from Saving Private Ryan. In the final battle scene, one of the characters–always squirrely and jumpy and unreliable–watches a Nazi soldier kill one of his comrades. It’s the scene where the Nazi slowly pushes the knife while reciting a prayer in German. The dynamic of the scene is impossible to miss. The audience is shocked and outraged and disgusted by the cowardice of this guy, because, of course, we’d all like to imagine having the courage to save our friend if we were in his place.
Ironically, during World War II, a fair number more of us would have been doing the same thing as the “coward” as today. In the 1995 book On Killing, Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and professor of psychology at West Point, tracks the development of soldier training from World War II, during which only 15 to 20 percent of American troops were prepared to fire their rifle to kill another human being, to Vietnam, when the military had dramatically increased that figure to 90 percent of soldiers. And anyone whose grandfather was a WWII vet and whose father a Vietnam vet can probably speak to the personal cost of that increased efficiency.
But the identification is still understandable. No one wants to think they’d let their friend be killed in front of them without acting. Most people, being essentially decent, imagine they’d help Anne Frank’s family or stand in front of the tank at Tianenmen Square. Unfortunately, though, very few of us are like that. The GI at My Lai who turned his guns on his own comrades to protect innocent children is the rarity; most of us, as infamous experiments like Milgram and Grossman’s account of the ruthless effectiveness of military training teach us, basically do whatever we’re told, and would busily be committing an atrocity.
But that doesn’t stop us from imagining our own endless capacity for doing whatever the right and courageous thing is. Hence the appeal of a Facebook Revolution. It’s a story that appeals directly to our own sense that we can do something amazing, and that, in fact, we already are through virtually no further effort on our part. It can’t happen here! If someone tries, why, we’ll all know on Facebook and immediately stand up to it! The news feed answers the question, who’s guarding the guardians? Well, of course, we are.
Time magazine had it dead on a couple years ago with its reflecty cover making us all the Person of the Year. Our democratic principles of course make us scoff at the notion that anything we do is that important, and we write it off as pandering on the part of the dead-trees MSM. But of course, we would do something that important if it came to it…just so long as we saw the invite in time to show up.
As the magazine frequently points out, being Person of the Year isn’t necessarily a good thing.
In short, the Facebook Revolution a story that appeals directly to what we, as Americans, want to think of ourselves, not who we actually are. (And I realize that this something essentially human as well, but Americans have a special hold on it. A German, say, has less room to claim that, in fact, it can’t happen there.) And it bothers me for a couple of reasons. One, it’s coming at the expense of the small group of dedicated activists who risked their lives over a period of years to–hopefully–help deliver their society from the clutches of a brutal dictator into a better future. And two, the idea that social media empowers us all to automatically ensure things never get too bad seems like a fancy way of praising ourselves for doing nothing.
One of the most high-minded social networking driven protests domestically in recent months was the “It Gets Better Campaign,” founded by Dan Savage in response to the rash of bullying-induced suicides of gay youths. Briefly, a harsh spotlight was put on things like school anti-bullying policies, many of which explicitly excluded discussions of bullying for sexual orientation as a sop to the anti-gay right. (I don’t like to read too much between the lines, but it sure as hell seems like that defines bullying gays as…not actually bullying.)
Did the incredibly popular and widely embraced campaign succeed in changing many of these? You’d be hard pressed to tell, since most follow-up reporting disappeared along with the rash of gay suicides (not that bullying, and the terrible cost of it, is gone–just our collective attention is elsewhere). For all its good intentions, It Gets Better is pretty indicative of a soft social network that has not exactly led to an eruption of protest at America’s anti-gay laws. In fact, the issue of gay rights is off the political radar now that DADT was repealed, creating the disgusting hypocrisy that gays can now openly serve and die for a country that legislates that they’re second-class citizens.
In short, the idea that doing nothing more than engaging via social networks can change the work is appealing–it flatters everything we want to think about ourselves, while at the same time indulging our worst tendencies towards inaction. The examples of Ahmed Maher and his colleagues in Kefaya should inspire us to act, just as David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil did in the courageous action at the Woolworth lunch counter in 1960–and remind us of the hard work, occasional risk, and sacrifice required to change the world and make it a better place, rather than accepting stories that tell us we’re already doing everything we should to build a better tomorrow.
Do you get it?
P.S. — I totally shared this on Facebook and wasn’t going to comment because of it. But then I thought typing LIKE into the subject line was pretty funny.
memememememememememe it’s the “me” meme!