I may as well rename this blog to Twitter Bashing Anonymous, amirite?
Anywhoo, I’d like to acquaint you with the idea of something called slacktivism, quite ably defined by the Snopes crew as follows:
We can’t claim credit for having coined this term, nor do we know its actual origin, but we love it nonetheless. Slacktivism is the search for the ultimate feel-good that derives from having come to society’s rescue without actually getting one’s hands dirty, volunteering any of one’s time, or opening one’s wallet. It’s slacktivism that prompts us to forward appeals for business cards on behalf of a dying child intent upon having his name recorded in the Guinness World Book of Records or exhortations to others to continue circulating a particular e-mail because some big company has supposedly promised that every forward will generate monies for the care of a languishing tot. (…) Slacktivism comes in many forms, but its defining characteristic is its central theme of doing good with little or no effort on the part of the person inspired to participate, through the mechanisms of forwarding, exhorting, collecting, or e-signing.
Emphasis mine. You can also call this attitude armchair activism.
Over recent days we’ve seen some terrible news coming from Iran. In response, we’ve seen a few memes flapping over Twitter:
- change your hometown to Tehran to confuse the Iranian authorities!
- colour your avatar green in support of the opposition!
- retweet everything that moves!
…among others, and along with it the onanistic cries of how Twitter is making a revolution happen.
Really?
I don’t want to diminish what’s happening in Iran. It’s horrific. I do, however, find it utterly baffling that people still believe that plugging a green overlay over one’s avatar is actually really making a difference to anyone other than their own fuzzy warm feelings. “Oh yeah, I’m part of the Iranian revolution! Time for a soy latte.”
I appreciate that many people feel strongly about what’s happening, and I’m even sure that some of the green-avatarred folk are feeling the impact of the Iranian election on themselves, friends, or family.
I’d be willing to bet, however, that most of these people are folks who just ran a little macro, gave themselves a nice self-congratulatory pat on the back for being so caring and progressive, and then went back to asking the lazyweb for iPhone app recommendations. It’s the 2009 equivalent of forwarding an e-petition to your entire address book, and it just makes me feel a little more sad for the state of the world every time a little green head pops up in my Twitter window.
The real action is happening in Iran; the flapping about on Twitter is happening mostly in the west. Don’t confuse solidarity with action.
Further reading:
The brave new world of slacktivism - Evgeny Morozov
The real issue here is whether the mere availability of the “slacktivist” option is likely to push those who in the past might have confronted the regime in person with demonstrations, leaflets, and labor organizing to embrace the Facebook option and join a gazillion online issue groups instead. If this is the case, then the much-touted tools of digital liberation are only driving us further away from the goal of democratization and building global civil society.
Twitter won’t bring down Ahmadinejad - Mike Madden
Contacts in Iran aren’t reporting much particular anxiety about what they’re doing online, Fassihian said. Once you’re already marching outside a government building even though Basij paramilitaries are shooting into the crowd, putting something on Twitter isn’t really a significant additional risk. And since Twitter doesn’t require users to publish their real names or other identifying information, tracking them might not be that easy, even if you control the major Internet pipelines into the country.
Includes this rather excellent letter:
Why is it that the only way we as Americans can identify with the struggles and aspirations of others is by co-opting their “moment” with inane observations about our possible contributions to it, through a communication platform that has thus far been used for delivering to the world the often inarticulate banalities of self-promoting C-level celebrities and future-hungry politicians?
More on Twitter and protests in Tehran - more from Evgeny Morozov
… However, this confusion over locations would also make it next to impossible to elucidate Twitter’s actual role in fueling and sustaining protests in Tehran. If I had a “Twitter revolution” thesis to protect here (and I don’t - I only do Moldova), this is exactly would I be encouraging people to do: the more Twitters we have on the ground, the easier it is to argue that Twitter did play a role. In short, you can kiss good-bye to any scholarly research into the actual impact of Twitter on protests in Iran, simply because the number of Twitter users in the country would be severely inflated and impossible to arrive at.
A study by Mike Edwards, a social network researcher at Parsons The New School for Design, examined 79,000 tweets related to the Iran protests, and found that one-third are repostings of other tweets. (…)
“There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening,” Edwards says. “The hubs are generally not people on the ground, and many are not in the country.”
(…) But Parsi, like others, acknowledges that Facebook and Twitter were important mainly for letting people outside the country follow events, and text messages and phone calls were the primary mover of people in Iran’s protests. “The people I know mainly tell me they hear about these protests from friends or by SMS,” Parsi says.
Update: Another link…
I’m Not Turning My Twitter Icon Green
By turning your icon green, what are you doing to help? It reminds me of signing a get well soon card for a coworker you’ve never met. You’re not REALLY helping. You don’t really know what’s going on. But you want to act like it in front of your friends, and your social network. You join the Facebook Group. You re-post a bulletin. You shade your icon. OK - do you think the Iranian government is scared of this green icon invasion? Doubtful.
Iran has always been an American target, and it’s funny that people are acting like they suddenly care. I didn’t hear much uproar or see green icons when John McCain said, “Ya know, like that song, Bomb-Iran, Bomb-Iran.”
(…) You should’ve always realized that the Iranian people are “people,” and they want out from the regime. What you see and hear about Iran on Fox News is not reality.
