TEN YEARS OF NOTHING - not one fucking thing!

[DBoy]

Al - the UN rejected the ambassador thing. They voted with a resounding "FUKING LOL MATE" and moved onto the next item. But seriously, they rejected it, there will be no ambassador for the alienics.

Fents - "probably the best coaching team ever" ??? On what basis is hirdy a good coach?

[CoB]

that makes me sad

[Fents]

Al - the UN rejected the ambassador thing. They voted with a resounding "FUKING LOL MATE" and moved onto the next item. But seriously, they rejected it, there will be no ambassador for the alienics.

Fents - "probably the best coaching team ever" ??? On what basis is hirdy a good coach?

point taken, yet to be proven.

[DBoy]

Geez, mate, being a poof has made you a real push over.

Nice to have a Essendon family thing going on though. so many clubs that dont have that any more.... having Jimmy being the face of Melbourne makes me feel a bit that way, but it is only one generation... didn't hirdy's Dad play for Essendon too?

[mrj]

I thought Hirdy played for the other team. If ya get me.

[almax]

Al - the UN rejected the ambassador thing. They voted with a resounding "FUKING LOL MATE" and moved onto the next item. But seriously, they rejected it, there will be no ambassador for the alienics.

I think you have mis-read whatever article you read, yes they denied the ambassador, but there was no vote as if it was a proposal, they just denied that the role existed

UN denies alien ambassador plan
Posted 3 hours 27 minutes ago

The United Nations has dismissed media reports that it is planning to appoint an ambassador to be the first point of contact with aliens.

Britain's Sunday Times had reported that a UN official had been given the task of co-ordinating humanity's response if extraterrestrials make contact.

However, the official in question, Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman, says that while she likes the idea of being an alien ambassador, the job does not exist.

so there was no voting, but there was probably alot of lol'n

[Fents]

have you not seen his wife mrj?

yea his dad only played four games i think...but Allan Hird Snr (Jimmy's grand dad i spose) played 100+ games about 1940. True essendon blood right there.

Pity bomber thompson dosnt want to come over to essendon, or does he?

[almax]

have you not seen his wife mrj?

Tania is totes Jimmy beard wife

[almax]

but Hird def reminds me of a young Roc Hudson...

[Lizkins]

one of the wives, either Buckley or Hirds, cant remember, but her head and general face scare me. looks whack

[almax]

[CoB]

I think you have mis-read whatever article you read, yes they denied the ambassador, but there was no vote as if it was a proposal, they just denied that the role existed

sounds like a cover up to me!!!
they actually NEED to appoint this person to such a role, because there already are aliens, and the malaysians have some nice fire twirling things, so she probably is the first contact when they arrive on earth like how they have dancers in different countries for diplomats.

[huge]

watch. straight ahead off the flash back there sir. there it is.

[CoB]

huh?

[huge]

you're meant to say, "yeah i see it too" then mad edits.

Watch the posted video on YouTube.

[Lizkins]

jeebus, both of em actually. moreso Hirdy's wife though, yikes

[Kaiproject]

Watch the posted video on YouTube.

[JAMESSSS]

Looks like someone came off about 15 to 20 feet up.

[JAMESSSS]

Pogo is so rad!

Watch the posted video on YouTube.

[Lizkins]

gosh quiet in here today

runs around off topic thread like a mental

[ghetto kitty]

dooly dooly do lizkins!!!

[Lizkins]

YAY GK running mental with me

this is us, running around da place

[youthful_implants]

[CoB]

nice start to a new page, i might as well join in *nods*

[deviant]

I just had a customer called.....

Yung Ho

[mrj]

choosing just 12 gigs of music to take on holiday is near impossible. some massive sacrifices had to be made.

needs phone with moar gigs.

[DBoy]

SPRING BEATS - by D-Boy.

Bounce to that beat in spring's warm heat. Move your feet as you eat spring's beaty treat. A little bit'o'bass comes rumbling in from deep below. And in the parks the rugs do spread and the underground beat heads mellow. A sun makes a rip in the sky above, lending us its bright, keeping us heads as a crew so tight. We lean to the left and dip into the pad, wondering just how winter got us feeling so sad. Life seems anew. THe darkness askew, as we head to the sand to drink another can, and turn up the sub for the dub to come back on the rub. It's the sign of the summer to come, the spring before, the sunny more and more, the beats crew gets warm, the heads on yougn flesh do turn, and we ready to get our park on, our going out without a hoodie, just let it all hang out and be silly - cause spring has sprung, and another period of fun in the sun has begun - my underground beat head sons!

[DBoy]

choosing just 12 gigs of music to take on holiday is near impossible. some massive sacrifices had to be made.

needs phone with moar gigs.

mmmmmmm. understood. And trying to contextulise the tunes as well. I would think Honkers would lead to some ninja tune and urban rumblings - while rural China would have me wanting something more atmpospheric and epic for movie like journies and movements.

[huge]

70's shaolin movie funk soundtracks tbh

[mrj]

choosing just 12 gigs of music to take on holiday is near impossible. some massive sacrifices had to be made.

needs phone with moar gigs.

mmmmmmm. understood. And trying to contextulise the tunes as well. I would think Honkers would lead to some ninja tune and urban rumblings - while rural China would have me wanting something more atmpospheric and epic for movie like journies and movements.

Yeh contextualising was way hard. I figured I would need some D&B for Hongkers, particularly train catching, and some trip hop as well (and Skream as well). Everything But The Girl had to be on there for late night city wanderings as did Portishead. Then Tech had to be present for going for runs in the park and hip hop for laying by the pool. Plus jazz is needed for drinking in the hotel room. Then for China I went with stuff like pink flloyd for foggy mountains in Jiuzhaigou and aussie rock for the fish out of water feeling.

virtually impossible to pack it in to 12 gig.

[DBoy]

Have a mad trip boooooooi. Return with some tales that will tantalise, don't want no plain jane arse we saw a statue biziness. I want to hear about ninja controversy and epic physical struggles with mammoth pandas in dark lanes pre dawn.

[almax]

I figured I would need some D&B for Hongkers, particularly train catching, and some trip hop as well (and Skream as well).

i thought you didnt like dubstep?

[Lil MiSbreaks]

Today could be the day!! meeting today, find out about my leave, depending on outcome, could depend on my employment at the end of today!

Its a lil exciting tbh, standing ground and walking away if once again, i get it in the arse.

[retzie]

Today could be the day!! meeting today, find out about my leave, depending on outcome, could depend on my employment at the end of today!

Its a lil exciting tbh, standing ground and walking away if once again, i get it in the arse.

Yay, stick it to 'em Sammy!

[elysium]

Its a lil exciting tbh, standing ground and walking away if once again, i get it in the arse.

I hear ya LMB! There is a definite exhilaration/high that you get when you realise "you know what, I am worth more than this" and don't let them push you around. Hope all goes well in your meeting - I would wish you courage and strength, but sounds like I don't need to -- you already got that in spades lady

[Lil MiSbreaks]

Thanks!!^^^ Its not finalised yet. So basically I can have my leave if I reduce some backlog. So I didnt get it in the arse TODAY, but if I dont somehow pull a few hours a day out of nowhere, THEN i'll get it in the arse. Which still isnt right. But i told her exactly how I felt about things, which felt good, but im still going to find a greener pasture.

If only my internet at home would work, i cant actually apply for any jobs yet!!

[gnat]

if this is your bloodz you gots problems. 50/50. farrrrrrrrrked

oh hai guys

[Fents]

wtf is that? looks like sometyhing i can ferment and turn into stuff.

[gnat]

that's blood from someone with really high cholesterol

i think he had been living on black and gold dimmies

[huge]

jeebus

[CoB]

*vomits*

[Fents]

that's blood from someone with really high cholesterol

i think he had been living on black and gold dimmies

fuck! now your just scaring me. i had my cholsetrol done last week....total chol was 6.6

LDL 4.3
Triglyc 2.1
Chol/HDL Ratio 5.1

and the lady who took my blood scared me bad - she says mid transfusion, hey have you drank any water today cause your blood is mighty thick!

doc said i need to start eating better and bit more excercise and get onto the marg that lowers chol. said my lungs and liver are PERFECT!

am i gonna die nurse gnat?

edit - made the doc freak though telling her my dad has had 3 heart attacks, two triple bypass's and a stroke! first heart attack at age 33 too. damn genes.

[Lizkins]

yikes Fents, i would get on to the healthy stuff straight away, ain't worth it. especially if your dad has gone through all that, fuck me

just think about Rach and your soon to be little one on the way while chowing down on vegies and salad for lunch and dinner

[elysium]

So basically I can have my leave if I reduce some backlog. So I didnt get it in the arse TODAY, but if I dont somehow pull a few hours a day out of nowhere, THEN i'll get it in the arse. Which still isnt right. But i told her exactly how I felt about things, which felt good, but im still going to find a greener pasture.

If only my internet at home would work, i cant actually apply for any jobs yet!!

That is good that you made it clear to her how you feel about it then and there. I totally agree with you that it still isn't right - they don't seem to have heard what you are saying! This is such typical bad management behaviour - diverting attention from their inability to effectively manage workflow in the team by blaming individual team members. How outrageous that she is using a backlog that is created by her mismanagement of resourcing as a bargaining chip against you -- to threaten you that she will withhold your leave no less!

Is your workplace organised (ie is there an active union there)? Never too late to join... they can be remarkably helpful.

I hope your interweb is up and working shortly so you can find those greener pastures soon...

[Lizkins]

too true, i reckon you need to find a new job LMB, this one causes you far too much grief



been busy last few days, now bored, dangit

[gnat]

that's blood from someone with really high cholesterol

i think he had been living on black and gold dimmies

fuck! now your just scaring me. i had my cholsetrol done last week....total chol was 6.6

LDL 4.3
Triglyc 2.1
Chol/HDL Ratio 5.1

and the lady who took my blood scared me bad - she says mid transfusion, hey have you drank any water today cause your blood is mighty thick!

doc said i need to start eating better and bit more excercise and get onto the marg that lowers chol. said my lungs and liver are PERFECT!


am i gonna die nurse gnat?

edit - made the doc freak though telling her my dad has had 3 heart attacks, two triple bypass's and a stroke! first heart attack at age 33 too. damn genes.

get going fents!

you need 30g of that marg a day to make a difference, which is fucking heaps and wouldn't advise adding unless you want to gain weight

30 min walk a day will make a dent in it for sure, and lotttts of fibre

if she reckons your blood is thick maybe they should look at your clotting times. they might rec you taking a daily aspirin!

[almax]

Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010 ... ntPage=all

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”

In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.

Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.

Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦

[CoB]

tl;dr

[DBoy]

ill wait till that comes out on video. (or pls provide summary).

[Lizkins]

i started to read it, then got bored. will also await summary