Discussion About Online Activism | by Ben
Personal Democracy Forum has a couple of big posts this week about the role of online groups in the democratic process. The lead post, America Offline, strongly advocates offline organizations, like our own little group, and wants to see the online activism of groups like Democracy for America use to encourage people to meet together and get involved in the organizations behind political power. The response, The Citizen and His Browser, Volunteering Alone, points to the online space as a replacement for inefficient real-life meetings and activities, and says that people want to be active, and that online groups allow that without taking up as much time as previous, face-to-face methods of organization.
I'm more sympathetic to the first posting, but I think both should be read. I really like the summary at the end of the first post:
...if we start to think of the internet as an organizing tool first -- a database of places as well as ideas, a database of calendars as well as pictures, we can also build a completely new social structure. It won't look like the voluntary associations of the 1950s, but it might get us past the isolation of the aughts.
Comments
I think I'm somewhere between the two articles.
I like going to DFT meetings. It helps me to see people face-to-face. Seeing Greg Hamilton, Richard Morrison, and Lorenzo Sadun helped make them "real" to me. People I should actively support instead of help, maybe, if I find the time. Sitting at tables with strangers has brought me in contact with folks I might have avoided on the internet. While I may not always agree with them, that's the point. It's good to be challenged and hear things you might otherwise avoid. When helping out the campaigns, it was good to have folks around to train me, give me encouragement, and make me feel like I was part of something.
Not that some of the items might not have been more efficiently done at home once I was trained. And not that I might not be able to see that activity is happening to still make me feel part of something. But an online-only solution leaves me cold. If I want to stay at home, am I really the type that's going to cold-call strangers? There are also advantages to having folks in a room together to all train up at once. If a bunch of newbies is going to go out and pass out fliers, it's more efficient to have all the questions raised in a bunch. If I'm the smart ass that got up early and started thinking I knew it all, I might have missed a question that I didn't know I didn't know the answer to.
That said, I did like some of the online stuff for the last campaigns. It helped to have lists of places to help register voters, so I could find the information when I had the time. It was also nice to see that others were out there too by seeing what other folks were up to. Having more volunteer information for the campaigns online would have helped. It would have been nicer if more campaign blogs didn't look like ghost-towns.
Posted by: Glenn | February 14, 2005 10:48 PM