It's official, I have moved the word "Movement" into the same category I have for overused words like "Gate" that is now tiredly hrown around for every two-bit scandal as if they are worthy of the designation used to describe the Constitutional crisis that led to Nixon's resignation.

(A friend last week shared with me the word Idiolect which is a person's own individual language which is my new favorite word. Please note that it is not related to idiotic. I plan to use it broadly even risking the assumption by others that I am calling myself an idiot which they may be readying to call me as well! Back to our story . . .)

As I wrote in the Social Citizens paper we are a society that is marinating in causes. Everywhere you turn, in stores, airports, schools, congregations, walking down sidewalks, there are worthy causes that we are pinging, poking, friending, and fundraising for. The advent of online social networking has led to the ability of individual causes to create a vast network of supporters instantly at almost no cost. The gold standard case of this is Moveon.org with its three million members, small staff size and outsized impact on elections and politicians.

So, what's my complaint? (today as my kids would say!) It's that the power of the Connected Age is the friction-free creation of large numbers of people to support a campaign and act in concert to impact an issue, legislation or public awareness of an issue -- and the power to let them go not to create the behemoth nonprofit institutions associated with last century. This is what the Obama/FISA protesters did in the last few weeks. That's good. What's bad is the tendency of organizers of these efforts to assume that these participants are now "theirs" and that a movement has begun. Ari Melber writes eloquently on the Nation's blog about the FISA protest as a budding net movement. However, I disagree with this assertion that all of these kinds of activities amount fo social movements. Social movements are fundamental shifts in what the citizenry believes and how a government changes laws to respond to these new beliefs. Again in the gold standard category for a social movement is the civil rights movement which changed our fundamental societal belief system about race in America, and when we use them too lightly we lose sight of the fact of how hard fundamental change is to achieve.

I am not disparaging the efforts of net activists (unlike Sally Kohn in her recent op-ed.) On the contrary, I think they are fundamentally changing the civic dialogue and allow for the participation of millions of voices like never before. I am suggesting, though, that these smaller campaigns need to ignite, grow, be successful, or in the FISA case not, and go away. These smaller campaigns are part of a larger shift of what I would call accordion style activism wherein people and campaigns are created and dissolve quickly. The tendency of organizers to want to own their participants beyond the initial campaigns is symptomatic of old-style hierarchical organizations and organizing.

I don't know for sure what 21st century social movements will look like that will truly overcome inequities in society. I do know, however, that they will look and feel fundamentally different from the movements of the last century and that attempts to control participants is the antithesis of real social change.

ari melber | Barack Obama | FISA | MoveOn.org | Sally Kohn
afine's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati