We’re attending the National Conference for Media Reform here in Minneapolis. We recorded Malkia Cyril’s speech on the occasion of receiving an award from Funding Exchange’s Media Justice Fund. Hint: it’s not about the media.
Check it out.
We’ve been looking at the grassroots community led social justice organization movement lately. As part of this we decided to see who PTP has reached over the years. It’s interesting primarily because it shows how widespread the movement is. Here’s a map from our web site:
We were recently in a discussion where the question of the efficacy of social networks such as moveon, truemajority, and the personal democracy forum came up. Someone expressed the view that when grassroots political dialog is conflated into “netroots” political dialog, community organizing’s constituencies are pushed out of the debate.
Community organizing is primarily concerned with making a local impact through face-to-face organizing. Some organizations and coalitions have a statewide impact and, every now and then, a national impact. Netroots uses internet communications to work in the opposite direction, first building a national or regional caucus of donors and bloggers, then it attempts to drill down. In the process, the issues and concerns of community organizing are just about entirely ignored by the netroots sphere.
While financial considerations are not the only factor, the economic base of blogging - online advertising - reinforces a self-referential model. It’s internet eyeballs that pay the piper. Bloggers drive traffic by reading and referencing each other. Netroots bloggers are not venturing out to make connections with existing community groups and learning the values and issues that drive this form of grassroots democracy.
Have you ever studied a map of moveon.org meetings or truemajority sponsored demonstrations? Placed on a map, the e-rooters are concentrated in the northeast, the upper Midwest, skip over the near west, and pop up again in the three western states. Online social networks are by and large an urban/inner suburb phenomenon. Community organizing shares some of this turf but is spread out across many more states and into the rural communities. Even where they are in the same cities, the organizational bases usually aren’t in the same census tracts or even the same zip codes. (It’s common knowledge:mydd Chris Bowers or Imedia Connection covers the daily Kos last year)
There’s more that they don’t share. They aren’t the same gender, color or religion. They also aren’t likely to see each other in school, on the job or shopping. Young people may meet in myspace, but even here the net fails to bridge the grand canyons of class and ethnicity. Consequently, when issues are debated or candidates vetted, it’s done by well meaning people who by and large haven’t experienced living a lifetime on low wages, losing a job promotion because of skin color or language skills, immigrating, union drives, inferior schools, coal companies grinding their landscape to dust.
Which leads us to the question in our discussion, if our constituencies are not part of the discussion are they better off with or without netroots?