Is technology undermining the much-vaunted community values of Millennials and creating a generation of semi-activists clicking for change on their computers, but ultimately disconnected and disempowered from each other and from the levers of real social change? This is the thesis posited by Sally Kohn, the director of the Movement Vision Lab at the Center for Community Change in an op-ed published in the Christian Science Monitor last week:

On their own, for example, none of the activists in the civil rights movement had sufficient power and influence to end segregation. Coming together in local committees, led mainly by young people, they used the tools of face-to-face community organizing, developing shared strategies to address shared problems. And they took shared action; in sit-ins and Freedom Rides, they formed groups that were more than the sum of individual parts.

By contrast, Internet activism is individualistic. It's great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and '70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there.

This is great for signing a petition to Congress or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society – the growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) – won't politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.

Over at Daily Kos, Georgia10 has already written an eloquent rebuttal highlighting the failures of the old activism models of the 60s in today's political and media environment, and the recent successes enjoyed by Millennials engaged in online activism. I won't rehash all that now. What I do want to point out is that this is not an either/or proposition, and to frame this as a zero-sum game between the old activism and the new creates a false dichotomy and friction where none needs to exist. There is no hard evidence showing that internet activism decreases offline activism. More mouse clicks does not equal fewer door knocks. In fact, the opposite is true.

According to a 2006 report by CIRCLE (pdf) on youth civic engagement (emphasis mine):

Internet Use and Civic Engagement

We separately asked about the frequency with which people go online, whether for news or other purposes. According to our survey, 69% of young people reported using the Internet at least a few times per week, and 41% reported using it daily. In general, those who use the Internet at least a few times per week are more engaged than those who never use it, while those who use it daily are the most engaged. For example, among those who do not use the Internet regularly, 72% are disengaged, and 23% have not participated in any civic engagement activities we measure. In contrast, among those who use the Internet daily, only 49% are disengaged, and only 10% have not engaged in any civic activities. That remains true even when we take into account the effects of education.

Statistics aside, there is hard evidence all around us that online engagement can produce just the sort of on-the-ground, community activism that Kohn desires. In 2006, tens of thousands of young immigrants and second generation Americans took to the streets to protest harsh, anti-immigrant legislation in Congress. Those mass protests, which received national attention in the media (and undoubtedly played a role in beating back the Sensenbrenner Bill), were organized primarily via MySpace and text messages. In 2007, at least 10,000 protestors descended on the small town of Jena, Louisiana to protest the unequal treatment six african-american students received at the hands of the local justice system. This protest, too, was primarily organized online via blog bloggers and the rising new - and internet savvy - organization Color of Change.

Without the internet, two of the most successful protests in our recent history - and ones that did not cater to an issue of great concern to the white upper-middle class elites who are normally associated with the netroots - would not have occurred. And in both instances, traditional community organizing groups, lauded by Kohn in her piece, found themselves playing catchup to the more agile internet organizers.

Today, one need only look to the campaign of Barack Obama to see that this trend is alive and well. Young Obama supporters are not just running successful campaigns on Facebook, they are finding each other online and building the social capital to change their local communities.

In a rebuttal to the post by Georgia10, Kohn states that she did not mean her piece to be taken as offering an either/or proposition - merely to highlight that the internet cannot achieve long-term radical change in our society by itself. With that, I agree wholeheartedly, but in saying so, Kohn defangs her entire thesis. Only the most starry-eyed techno-utopians believe that the internet can supplant all other forms of activism to change our world. Every serious person involved in the use and discussion of technology in politics recognizes that the internet is but one tool among many; that it does not replace older forms of activism, but rather compliments and strengthens them. In the end, Kohn seems to be fighting a straw-man of her own devising. The kids are alright. And so is the internet. In fact, they're better than ever.

Comments (7)

1. The fact that so many people are trying to rebut Kohn by pointing out that online activism tends to increase off-line activism proves her point. Kohn isn't saying there's no place for online activism ( she runs a blog, just managed the overhaul of the CCC website, and has put a lot of time into helping folks she knows think through how to be engaged online) but she's simply making clear that online activism alone won't change the world. Can anyone disagree with that?

   Posted by Ocin at 07/11/2008 @ 11:21am

2. "In general, those who use the Internet at least a few times per week are more engaged than those who never use it, while those who use it daily are the most engaged."

   Enthralling. How did they ever figure it out?

   Posted by Benchrest at 07/11/2008 @ 11:21am

3. For crying out loud, people, if you don't like the CIRCLE study, then do your own study, and let's hear your results.

   "Zero," you should either provide some evidence to back up what you have said to disparage the bloggers and commentators on "DailyKos," or you should apologize.

   I have great respect for both Sally Kohn and for "Georgia10," but neither writer has identified what I believe are the real reasons why the old-fashioned modes of activism seem less effective now. "Georgia10" merely "highlight[ed] the failures of the old activism models of the 60s in today's political and media environment."

   I believe some more needs to be said about that, specifically how government has managed to roll back the people's Constitutional right to assemble peacefully in public places, partly by allowing these spaces to be gobbled up by private and semi-private entities. For example, look at local convention centers that were once named for cities and counties, but are now named after corporations, places that once belonged to the public, but where now anybody with a sign can be kicked out for "trespassing."

   Something needs to be said about how the corporate media have learned studiously either to ignore large demonstrations, to claim that a demonstration "turns violent" when police initiate the violence, or to present the views of the demonstrators' opponents, who may not have summoned together a counter-demonstration one tenth the size, as if these views were equally popular.

   These are the problems with "today's political and media environment" that make old-school movement tactics less effective than they were a generation ago.

   Posted by JakobFabian at 07/12/2008 @ 08:39am

4. Sorry, everybody, it seems that the "time warp effect" has begun again. Please read the following two postings before you read mine, just above. Thank you.

   Could this have something to do with time zones? I live in the Central Standard Time zone. What about you?

   Posted by JakobFabian at 07/12/2008 @ 09:03am

5. Dang. What a mess. Sorry again. I guess I shouldn't comment about "time warping." That just makes the thread harder to decipher.

   Posted by JakobFabian at 07/12/2008 @ 09:05am

6. One important fact that can't be denied is that real investigative 'news' information distribution has increased via the internet as real news in the MSM has declined. Without the net, activism would be based on what? Bad entertainment?

   Here's a little nugget:

   "For me, a competent investigation would have to look at who is trying to make it look like Condit did the impossible, kidnapped and murdered a woman that we didn't know whether she was dead or kidnapped in the first place while he was meeting with the Vice President, and why. That would have been her parents and the law firm they hired to get the news media stirred up about her disappearance. And since her parents loved her and were in California when she disappeared, we can rule them out as suspects. So that leaves who was responsible for the PR campaign, the law firm Blank Rome, one of the biggest in the nation so we know they not fools yet they were leading a serious investigation into the whereabouts of a young girl in a seriously flawed direction when no one had any idea what truly happened to her. But we have no evidence they had anything to do with her disappearance or motive to cover up the truth either. So we're left with what Condit was doing at the time she disappeared as the only source of information for why they would try to lead the investigation in an all too obvious wrong direction.

   But the thing about that is it's hard to look into what transpired between Condit and the Vice President because Cheney still refuses to give up the records on his meetings regarding his "energy task force" that included some with Enron officials, which we know how at that time, Enron was begging President Bush to bail them out of the trouble they'd gotten into that lead to the company crashing a few months later. So even without the minutes of the meeting between Condit and Cheney, I am looking at evidence that something about Cheney's energy task force was dark and mysterious because he has fought so hard for so many years to keep anyone from knowing what he was doing. And with the state of energy policy in this country now, I can only imagine what he was talking about in all his secret meetings. But the mere idea that Condit was in a secret meeting with the Vice President at the time of Chandra's disappearance where would never have known who he was much less where he was when she disappeared if someone wasn't trying to make it look like he had something to do with what happened to her. From my perspective, the shadiest character in the room when looking for suspects in Chandra Levy's murder at this point would be Cheney. So I would want to know what Condit had to do with these shady dealings with the Vice President. It's been my experience that where there's smoke, there's fire. And there certainly seems to have been a lot of smoke coming from Pennsylvania Avenue at the time Chandra disappeared, we've just never been told what was burning, although a lot of people are wondering now that gasoline is over four dollars a gallon and the nations is falling apart.

   So what are the facts we do have regarding Cheney and his secret meetings. We know Enron has something to do with whatever Cheney doesn't want anyone to know about, that it's central to what he's trying to protect from public scrutiny because he's most viscous in his attempts to keep his energy task force records confidential when it comes to the Enron meetings. And we know Enron contributed more money to Bush's presidential campaign than any other single source over the prior election year and wanted him to bail them out of all the trouble they were in. This is important because at the time Chandra went missing, there were what was called "rolling blackouts" going on back in Condit and Levy's hometown distract in California that we now know were being caused by Enron's energy online traders who were gaming the energy market driving the price of their products up so they made billions of dollars they had no right to think they deserved while putting California through extremely harrowing times to steal it. So of course you would expected Levy and Condit communicated closely over the issue being in Washington DC so far from everyone they cared the most about who were going through something that perhaps Condit was the only person that could do anything about.

   ...

   Both Democrats and Republicans as well as environmentalists had supported MTBE being added to gasoline. It was the brainstorm of Halliburton, Ken Lay of Enron, and old man George Bush. Its use was forced on us as a mandate in the Clean Air Act of 1990. By 1999, everyone was happy with it because it was said to have gotten rid of smog. So the fact that it polluted groundwater wherever it was used, and even where it wasn't because it came done in rain polluting regions fortunate enough to have escaped it leaking from underground storage tanks, the truth about it was systematically ignored being by everyone we trust would have warned us about that kind of problem and done something about it.

   ...

   The thing you have to understand is that if it weren't for the state of California making so much noise about MTBE polluting groundwater, in particular coming most loudly from Condit and Levy's districts, even more so, from Condit himself who was actively sponsoring some of the most damaging MTBE legislation in the country at the time. This was certainly discussed at the meeting with Cheney, and between Condit and Levy before the meeting as a matter of mutual concern. That along with the rolling blackouts going on at that same time being caused by Enron paints a much darker picture of that meeting and why Cheney won't allow the records of those meeting to be released. See Enron was trying to steal money from California to try to pay their bills for pretending to be using MTBE when it wasn't being used, which of course they chose to do this to California because if it weren't for Californians being so vocal about MTBE, hardly anyone would have known what it was.

   ...

   So as I watched how the investigation into her disappearance was unfolding where there was a media frenzy nationwide for months on end about facts that when put together made absolutely no sense while it should have been plainly obvious to people even other than me that there might be a connection to what happened to her and Condits business with the Vice President. My opinion was that she was still alive at the time, or Condit was made to think it because he failed to stand up for himself over the obvious misplaced focus put on him having anything to do with her disappearing, which his silence was only leading everyone to think he was guilty even though he couldn't have been because he was with the Vice President when she disappeared.

   So I played a little game with the law firm Blank Rome here in Washington DC who her parents hired to oversee the investigation into finding their daughter. It just so happened that they also represented the interests of the MTBE industry lobbying for it to be added to national gasoline supplies in 1990 by discreetly supporting the notion that future MTBE lawsuits over polluted groundwater could be mitigated by keeping federal testing standards from ever being done. They continue to do to this today where as recently as last year they published an article titled "Public Nuisance in MTBE Litigation: An Attempt to Expand Tort Law beyond Its Historical Parameters" In it they describe people who have been made sick by MTBE as not being able to even prove that MTBE made the(m) sick calling them a nuisance to big industry. It's true however that we can't prove what made us sick, but that's because they've never done the required testing that would afford us being able to substantiate that their product is indeed poison. Of course we can assume that they've done the testing themselves so what their article does is simply mock people MTBE destroyed the lives of for not being able to prove what they already knew all along.

   ...

   But before I could take this new direction in my efforts to expose the whole truth about MTBE, after over four months of hearing pretty much nothing else talked about in Washington DC except Chandra Levy, on September 11, 2001, 4 jet liners were highjacked and flown into two of the World Trade Centers in New York City, the Pentagon, while a fourth plane heading for the White House was retaken by heroic passengers and flown into the ground.

   ...

   Look at what just came out yesterday. Actually it came out in March but we didn't know who was behind it then. California applied to the EPA for a waiver on federal emissions standards so they could write their own stricter rules because their cities suffer from such horrible pollution. One of the areas they wanted to beef up was in how they regulate low level ozone forming pollutants which ethanol being added to gasoline the way it's being done now would be threatened if they were allowed to follow the direction they wanted to go. So they were denied their request while there was evidence that someone in the White House was working very hard to hide the truth about how bad low level ozone is for human health and plants growing in the environment.

   It was known that the Bush administration had systematically undermined the protocols the EPA follows for such requests by personally changing or deleting information in the EPA's report to try to justify why they were denying the request where the consensus at the EPA before this White House interference was that there was no justification for not letting California have what it wanted in reducing ozone pollutants. "

   http://pr.cannazine.co.uk/content/view/445/27/

   Posted by hsuBfools at 07/12/2008 @ 2:35pm

7. "The Web Will Not Kill Traditional Organizing"

   well, duh.

   how else are we gonna make babies?

   Posted by frosty zoom at 07/13/2008 @ 11:32am