It’s always informative to read the news two years later. Andrew Boyd’s depiction of a brave new wired world empowering grassroots activism must have read as a hopeful herald of more democratic times. Today, alas, is reads more like a casualty list for the political left. The Iraq war (which he depicts prematurely as “over”) hardly seemed to notice the two massive marches that he describes. Howard Dean’s campaign foundered as soon as Iowans began to vote. Even the huge protest turnout at the 2004 Republican National Convention resulted in yet another term for George W. Bush, along with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress. So if online electronic organizing is so effective, where’s the beef?
Maybe Otto Pohl’s New York Times piece on flash mobs holds a clue. Large groups can be mobilized for pretty much no reason at all. They’ll show up to eat a banana, applaud without cause…whatever. I’ve often heard that within the offices of government there’s a hierarchy to letters received–one that is inversely proportional to the difficulty of creating and delivering the correspondence. Telegrams, which are expensive rank at the top of the list. Handwritten letters are a little lower down. Emails are lower and anything mass produced, like online petitions are the dregs of opinion. So does the lower effort involved in digital organizing suffer from the same dynamics? If getting a million men to march takes only the effort once required to assemble a hundred, should we rank it the same? Do we rank it the same? Perhaps there’s a kind of consumer protest index that inflates with ease of assembly. In that case, the increase in power from electronic communication would come with a proportional discount in the valuation of the message. We’ve seen this before with digital tools. Who today is impressed with custom fonts, or laser printed pages? When we raise the power of digital tools, we also raise the bar for achievement.