We have a tendency to view technology as the catalyst for change—particularly when some non-Western country is revolting. Technology has given the West the power to peer into events happening on the other side of the world while maintaining the perception that those things would never happen here, in the stability of an established democracy.
The portal works both ways, however, and organized protest is a universal activity. Just as Americans paid attention to the events in Cairo, Egyptians are paying attention to the unions in Wisconsin, sending pizzas to feed the protesters.
Somewhere in between the utopian promise of global connectivity and the dystopian fear of losing humanity lies the practical truth about the value of technology in politics. A key part of this puzzle is microactivism, the small-scale, many-to-many communication that facilitates political expression.
Microactivism includes activities such as retweeting links and joining Facebook groups, interactions that reflect political intentions without necessarily rising to the level of political mobilization. There is value in this low-barrier, low-effort form of activism, according to CLU’s José Marichal, who recently examined how Facebook groups are formed. Such spaces are useful to communicate who a person wants to be, as an extension of their identity rather than a separate self. “Political Facebook groups allow for the performance of these ‘possible selves’ through the formation of idealized political identities,” Marichal writes.
Adopting a view of politics as a meaning-making process gives greater importance to microactivism as an important step toward realizing an idealized political self. Particularly since a platform like Facebook encourages sharing of your own identity, contributions to groups and other spaces attached to that identity allow political choices to strengthen ties to everyday life. Microactivism offers a middle ground between full activism and disengagement. Marichal considers it an open question whether or not this behavior leads to advanced forms of engagement.
Much of this activity takes place in the “filter bubble”—content aggregators that inhibit exposure to contrasting points of view—where cross-cutting conversations don’t often take place. One concern with microactivism is that it reinforces homogeneous views of the world.
In a University of Bremen study of how scientific paradigms are adopted, researchers discovered a relationship between adoption of ideas and innovation:
Overall, the model shows how new paradigms have a tendency to quickly rise to dominance, to decline slowly, and to quickly be replaced by other paradigms. When the innovation rate is high, the takeover process is chaotic, with many new ideas competing for dominance.
In this model, the researchers have defined innovation as something that occurs in a vacuum, essentially, with the competing method of idea adoption coming from peer endorsement. “Our model suggests that herd mentality makes a larger system less innovative than several smaller ones,” Stefan Bornholdt says. “In short, for innovation it’s better to listen to yourself than to others.â€
While I take issue with the oversimplification of that definition, the dynamics of a political system are a tension between exposure to socially-supported ideas and those derived from one’s own experience. The herd mentality leads to fewer new ideas and more dominating adopted ones. For politics, that could help explain the extreme polarization we are experiencing: Social endorsement of ideas has greatly outweighed our personal meaning-making.
What would be the impact on political discourse to have a social network present discrete issues endorsed by a mix of ideologically-diverse friends? Would microactivism suffer because the political identities of friends have been muddled, or would the same activity continue with the benefit of exposure to diverse ideas?