Twitter won't save the world, but it will help

At last weekend’s TEDx talks, my friend Sierra Murdoch ’09.5 gave an unexpected piece of advice. “Stay away from screens,” she cautioned, “Be wary of social media. It’s an important tool, but if relied on to much if can trick us into believing change can happen quickly.” I looked up from my laptop on which I had been live-Tweeting the day’s events, appropriately embarrassed. I’ve spent years staying up to date on the latest “Web 2.0” tactics for political organizing, amassing a new vocabulary of “hashtags” and “bit.lys.” I pride myself on my ability to blog in bed. Was all my work for naught?

After all, web-based democracy is supposedly the tactic that helped enable some of the most stunning progressive political changes in my lifetime. Wasn’t it the power of the internet and the “meet-up” that drove Howard Dean’s presidential candidacy (with some help from Midd alum and TEDx speaker Michael Silberman ’01)? Wasn’t it the massive online fundraising that helped Barack Obama compile the largest campaign war chest ever? Didn’t Twitter and Flickr help spread word of the “Green Revolution” in Iran?

But, perhaps uncharacteristically, I decided to keep listening to Sierra rather than start to check out a new album on Facebook or hop on Gchat. The problem, she said, was that climate campaigners (and all other do-gooder types working on the web) aren’t putting our time and energy in the right places. Everyone’s so busy working to get “likes” on their Facebook page or to accumulate views on their Vimeo accounts that we’re forgetting the crucial core of grassroots organizing: human interaction. It is only through a long arduous process of actually talking to people that we’ll be able to build the movement we need to tackle this problem. We need to find out what the average American actually thinks about the state of politics, the wind turbines going up in her neighbor’s farm, and what worries or excites them most about the future. And we need to actually listen when they tell us they don’t give a damn about polar bears, the amorphous promise of “green jobs,” or the unfairness of the filibuster. It’s by meeting folks where they’re at and helping them get engaged on the political level where they feel most comfortable that we’ll achieve the sorts of radical transformation the world so desperately needs. Not by having them sign a web petition.

Where then does the “series of tubes” fit in? Is there no room for the interwebs? Midd alum and 350.org organizer Jamie Henn ’07 tackled this question in a post on the Huffington Post just this month. “All around the world, there's a new set of Young (twittering) Turks that are shaking up the status quo and offering a new way forward,” wrote Jamie, “You'll find them in places like China and India, where students there are building youth climate networks linking hungreds of colleges and universities. Or at campaigns like Avaaz.org, which has built a global activist network of over 5.5 million members in just three years. Or across Africa, where mobile phones are allowing young organizers to coordinate across the continent for the first time.”

All that YouTubing and Facebook poking are helping facilitate that real world interaction. We can’t afford to organize in some bizarre “SecondLife” reality, but we can use the new media and social networking tools to help facilitate in-person conversation and political movement building. That’s what 350.org did this past week as hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world organized “work parties” in their communities and synced their actions with others worldwide through the internet. A click of a mouse can’t put solar panels on your roof, but it can help you find other folks who will help you do it. And at the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters?