Feeding a movement

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2022 (1575 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Anyone who wants to change the world should start by reading this thought-provoking book. Gal Beckerman, the senior editor for books at the Atlantic magazine, argues that the internet and digital media have almost completely annihilated traditional written modes of communication. For better or worse, as Marshall McLuhan discerned, the tools of communication determine the message.

Sites like Twitter and Facebook are exceptional means of communication, but are deliberately designed to grab attention by producing content that triggers feelings of outrage, sadness and disgust, appealing to emotion over reason.

Beckerman supports his argument by taking us on a whirlwind tour of how differing forms of communication, from the 17th-century postal system to 21st-century digital forums, shaped radical change.

He recounts 11 compelling stories of men and women such as: Nicolas-Claud de Peiresc, whose voluminous letter writing helped to pioneer the scientific method; the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor, who inspired the English working class to fight for universal voting rights; Nigerian Nnamdi Azikiwe, who created an anti-colonial consciousness in West Africa; Soviet dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for publicly revealing the lies of the government; and the more recent digital warriors behind the Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter movement and the doctors and scientists who created a network of information to battle COVID-19.

Referencing Saul Alinsky and Hannah Arendt, Beckerman holds that enduring change begins with periods of quiet intensity, when small groups of people discuss what might be done about some particular moral blight. Slowly, through argument, research and increasing public acceptance, abstract ideas become movements that become concrete laws.

In Peiresc’s time, the basics of the modern postal system were in place, although it might take months for a letter to be delivered and responded to. For the first time, a conversation could be held by mail, two people far apart could collaborate by trading ideas. Peiresc conceived a plan whereby with the assistance of dozens of observers scattered around the Mediterranean, he could revolutionize map-making by accurately measuring longitude. Success came in 1636 after 25 years and thousands of letters.

At the other extreme, in 2010, Egyptian Wael Ghonim was so horrified by the brazen murder of a young man by the police that he started a Facebook page to protest. In no time it had over five million users. His Facebook page erupted with outraged voices of discontent. Videos of police brutality whipped up emotions and calls for the resignation of the despotic president Hosni Mubarak. Defying police and the army, hundreds of thousands of protesters thronged into Cairo’s Tahrir Square and occupied it for 18 days.

Mubarak resigned. What had been impossible to imagine only a few months before had been accomplished by a Facebook campaign. The protesters had skipped the period of quiet intensity and gone straight for the action. At the apparent moment of success, they had neither a unified program nor plan. But the Islamic political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and its enemy, the Egyptian army, each had well-planned objectives. At the end of the day, the army prevailed and Egypt once more became a repressive dictatorship.

However, tried and true methods of mobilization can still work. Across the state of Georgia, Stacey Abrams and her volunteers spent years organizing meetings and door-to-door conversations to register new voters and win the 2020 Senate election for the Democrats.

Given the predominance of digital communication, Beckerman recommends a combination of in-person campaigning with strictly regulated chat apps that limit the number of users, thus allowing for more thoughtful and less emotional discussion.

Unfortunately, as Beckerman describes it, the people most adept at exploiting these types of closed chat rooms appear to be white supremacists.

John K. Collins expected the Ban the Bomb movement to succeed because its arguments were so rational. Maybe it just needed a hashtag.