Online Social Networks VS Online Social Change Networks

While online social networks are potentially useful for recruitment, they present a danger to activists by promoting bad strategy and ineffective forms of networking. By contrast a good social change network, such as Activism Network, will encourage strategic thinking and promote grassroots activism.

Good Uses for Online Social Networks
First, let us examine where online social networking ought to be most useful and see how it does.

Recruitment
I suspect online social networks are most useful for recruitment. This makes sense if they operate like off-line networks. It is clear from social movement research that the most critical factor to mobilize people to participate in social movements is a network (aka relational) tie to someone else involved. People are generally recruited by their friends or acquaintances. Even if you are recruited by a stranger, through additional participation in group events, one becomes acquainted with group members and this dramatically increases the likelihood of a cycle of continued participation.

Where online social networks fall short is that while they are able to recruit people, the key to maintaining these people in your organization really lies in face to face interaction.

I have not tried to recruit people using online social networking software into support a campaign and thus cannot judge how effective this is.

In my experience, recruiting isn’t so much a problem as retention and leadership building.

Event Publicity
I’ve seen my friends use Friendster and MySpace bulletins primarily to advertise events. This works ok, but it falls apart if your friends are spread across many cities (and people are moving with greater frequency). Also, if even just a strong minority of your friends were doing this, then you would be overloaded by the number of events. A community could easily have anywhere from 10 to 1000 activist events per week, and if you have 50-200 friends, they are probably organizing and participating in a lot of things.

Giving people customized event information is tricky. Activism Network sorts events by geographical scope so your friend in California doesn’t need to know about your local event in DC.

Limitations of Social Networks

Where are the Campaigns?
Online social networks give networking a bad name by promoting socializing (and time wasting) at the cost of getting serious campaign work done. Users of an online social network will spend their time trying to find old friends, new ones, adding people they don’t even know and will never meet as friends, commenting, looking at profiles, and other tasks that have practically nothing to do with working for institutional social change.

Most people know about small things they can do to try and make a difference, like voting, writing a letter, signing a petition, volunteering, or donating money. But very few people understand and feel empowered enough to take on City Hall, a corporate, or another institution to achieve long-term social change.

No Campaigns
There are very few campaigns on MySpace or Friendster. For the few that exist, the bulk of the organizing is done traditionally – by holding meetings, conference calls, email lists, websites, conference, days of action, producing materials and the like.

Fake Groups
Online social networks are full of groups that are so loosely defined that they are unlikely to achieve much. An online collection of random individuals who loosely share a common belief never changed squat (though it might lead to a lot of time spent looking at sexy group member photos). By contrast ten people who are having weekly meetings can take on and beat City Hall.

No Skills Resources
You don’t get the skills to become an activist from an online social network. You need to get first-hand movement experience, to attend conferences and trainings, and to read (campaign and skill materials).

Action Alerts as Bad Activism
One of the few things an online social network is good for is building up a list of thousands of people that you can ask to fill out an action alert. Due to over-use, action alerts are becoming less and less useful (particularly email actions targeting high levels of government). The typical use of action alerts is top-down and undemocratic. A national organization tries to mobilize their supporters to engage in an action alert. Instead of accepting this narrow form of involvement we should be empowering people to become active participants and decision-makers in local organizations.

Overall the biggest problem is the utter lack of any strategic campaign focus. That’s number one and without it you are misleading people with good intentions and getting them to waste their time.