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Paul Loeb: The Seductions Of Clicking: How The Internet Can Make It Harder To Act (‘Soul Of A Citizen’)

Without online technologies, Barack Obama would never have gotten past the primaries. Had Facebook, YouTube, texting, a 13-million name email list and a website developed by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes been absent from his campaign, he would never have raised enough money, been seen and heard by enough people, or enlisted enough volunteers. Yet progressive hopes are faltering, not only because of Obama’s compromises and mistakes and Republican intransigence, but also because far too many of his supporters have come to believe they can act exclusively through these online technologies, to the exclusion of face-to-face politics.

Think about your own political participation since Obama took office, and compare it to 2008. You’ve probably signed online petitions, clicked to contact your representatives, maybe commented on political blogs. These are valuable activities. I do some most every day. But they aren’t the same as knocking on doors, making phone calls, talking politics with people who may disagree with you, and doing all the other things that created the 2006 and 2008 Democratic victories. They also aren’t the same as rallying in the streets, attending town meetings, picketing the offices of predatory corporations or destructive politicians, or working in other visible ways to shift America’s political culture. Since November 2008 it’s been the political right that’s largely dominated public discussion, even though the policies they espouse created our multiple crises to begin with. Of course they have the advantage of a shameless echo chamber, from Andrew Breitbart to Rush Limbaugh and Fox. But the grassroots right has also been more active on the ground, while those of us who helped elect Obama have acted in mostly virtual ways, leaving us all too often invisible and unheard.

This dual aspect of online engagement isn’t new. It’s been building since the Internet came of age. But it’s worth looking both at how technologies that we now take as for granted as the air we breathe have both empowered us politically and created new traps.

We now expect that organizations that would once have reached us through expensive mailings or time to contact us via the internet. As action alerts arrive in our inbox, we click and sign, and our Congressional representative receives the letter or petition du jour. Or a group we support sends out a video of an ad it wants to run on network television, we donate $25 (along with 10,000 others), and it shows up in its audience’s living rooms two days later. The founder of the Students for Barack Obama Facebook group mined the site for references to Obama, and grew her organization into a 150,000-name list while barely leaving her campus in Maine. Where Daniel Ellsberg had to laboriously copy 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks can make enormously consequential buried documents available near-instantly.

Our online networks build on what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “the strength of weak ties.” Older forms of community built on distinct local networks where people knew each other face-to-face, but where reaching out beyond those they saw day-to-day was harder. Our new tools make it easy to maintain far looser networks that we can continue to easily nurture. As Gideon Rosenblatt of the environmental group Groundwire points out, “these networks of weak ties can be put into action on a moment’s notice, enabling online social change efforts to go viral at a speed and on a scale never previously possible.” We take for granted our ability to link overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances in a manner until recently inconceivable.

For all its strengths, though, online activism has its limits. True, we can pass on information to friends who are on the fence about issues or haven’t yet gotten involved. But most of what we do with the new tools reaches the unconvinced only fleetingly, and in a way that’s often too peripheral to engage them. Because the threshold of response is so low, the representatives to whom we send our online petitions and automated emails can readily discount them. Even those who know us can become so saturated that they dread hearing from us. So while our forwarding, clicking, and networking can help us reach out and be heard, the Internet furthers social and political engagement only when it’s used alongside other approaches. It’s all-too-tempting to assume that because we’ve clicked on a petition on a given day, that’s all the political involvement we need.

MoveOn’s election efforts illustrate the challenge of persuading people to act offline. In 2006, the organization mobilized roughly 100,000 members to call Democratic-leaning voters who had a history of only showing up intermittently at the polls. Although follow-up studies suggested these calls made a major difference, just three percent of the organization’s members participated. Most didn’t make the leap from clicking and sending to picking up the phone or knocking on a door. In 2008, MoveOn created a massive phone bank where members called other members and encouraged them to participate–and managed to get a fifth of its members involved. But it took this older and more personal technology to do so. The organization and others continue to try to involve people face-to-face through efforts like their local MoveOn Councils and August 10 rallies against the corruption of American politics by money, but it will always take more than emails to get large number of people to participate.

We resist these more challenging forms of involvement because of vulnerability. We’re invisible when we click, even if our name is attached to a letter or petition. If people disagree with us, we don’t see their faces or hear their voices. When we call or knock on someone’s door for a cause, we’re far more exposed, not to mention ambivalent about intruding on private space. We’re even more vulnerable when we raise contentious issues with people who know us. While our wonderful electronic tools can help people take non-threatening first steps toward engagement, proceeding beyond that is neither automatic nor inevitable.

The new technologies also help scatter our attention. We can waste endless days and nights clicking on Weblinks, texting or Tweeting about the minutiae of our lives, or being so focused on our Facebook friends that we have little time left for flesh-and-blood relationships, much less larger causes. Our Attention Deficient Disorder culture creates so many competing claims that it’s now almost impossible to escape the noise, and harder still to distinguish important claims from trivial ones.

Given all this, we’d do well to remember that our new technologies work best when we combine them with more traditional mechanisms of engagement. The Obama campaign complemented new-media tools by establishing on-the-ground field offices in every corner of key states, recruiting and training local volunteers with deep community roots, following up again and again to get supporters to create the kinds of political conversations that actually changed minds. Similarly participants in recent immigration rallies texted, emailed and Tweeted to help bring their friends. But they also got encouragement through their churches, through Spanish-language radio, and through networks of more direct personal outreach. We’re going to need all the public conversations we can create between now and November, and beyond.

When we create these more face-to-face connections, they can build sustaining community, which is no small thing in these frustrating times. For all the strengths of online engagement, people still need to gather together, eat, joke, flirt, tell their stories, attach names to faces, and ultimately build deeper levels of trust. And we need to keep reaching out in less glamorous ways. An activist in the University of Connecticut PIRG chapter described how she ignored endless email and Facebook solicitations for worthy causes. “Then someone actually called me. I was just so surprised because people almost don’t do that anymore. It’s easier to get involved when you’re actually talking with another person.”

If we assume that people will jump on our favorite cause just because they receive our communiqués and agree with us in principle, we underestimate the degree of inertia in our culture. For most people who are contemplating taking their initial steps into social involvement, a more intimate approach is often required, one that will put them at ease one question at a time, take their hesitations and uncertainties into account, and reassure them that the barriers they face are hardly unique. This more personal reach is key to enlisting new allies and to ensuring our political actions are visible enough to create a genuine public impact. That doesn’t mean abandoning the astounding communicative tools we now have. But if we want to realize their potential, we’re going to have to sooner or later step away from our screens.

Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, publication date April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”

Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. HuffPo will serialize selected sections of “Soul” every Thursday. Check here to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones. For more information or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.

More on Activism

Robert Scheer: Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers

What WikiLeaks did was brilliant journalism, and the bleating critics from the president on down are revealing just how low a regard they have for the truth. As with Richard Nixon’s rage against the publication of the Pentagon Papers, our leaders are troubled not by the prospect of these revelations endangering troops but rather endangering their own political careers. It is our president who unnecessarily sacrifices the lives of our soldiers and not those in the press who let the public in on the folly of the mission itself.

What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security interest is doomed. What is revealed on page after page is that none of the local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our president’s agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively homegrown.

Our fixation on al-Qaida has nothing to do with them. President Barack Obama’s top national security adviser admitted as much when he said last December that there were fewer than 100 of those foreign fighters left in Afghanistan. Those who do remain in the region are hunkered down in Pakistan, and as the leaked documents reveal, that nation is just toying with us by pretending to cooperate while its intelligence service continues to support our proclaimed enemies. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal made clear in his famous report, the battles in Afghanistan are tribal in nature and the agendas are local–be they about drugs, religion or the economic power of military blackmail. The documents contain a steady drumbeat of local hustles that are certainly deadly but rise to the level of a national security threat against the U.S. only when we insist on making their history our own.

It has ever been so with the Afghans, and our continued attempt to bend their passions to our purposes will always lead to horrid results. That is, in fact, just how their nation came to be the launching pad for the 9/11 attacks, which is the ostensible purpose of our occupation. We meddled in their history in a grand Cold War adventure to humble the Soviets by attacking the secular government in Kabul with which Moscow sided.

When presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs intones, “We are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11,” he is mouthing a dangerous half-truth. The opposite is the case: 9/11 happened because the U.S. was in the region, and not the other way around. Entanglement with Afghanistan has been based on a tissue of lies since day one, when Jimmy Carter first decided to throw in with the religious fanatics there, as current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates revealed in his 1996 memoir. Gates had served on Carter’s National Security Council and in his book exposed what the publisher touted as “Carter’s never-before revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen–six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Our government recruited terrorists from the Arab world to go to Afghanistan and fight in that holy war against godless communism with even greater enthusiasm during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed the Muslim fanatics “freedom fighters.” As the 9/11 Commission report stated, those freedom fighters included Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks.

Three years before that attack, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, was asked in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he answered: “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

One of Carter’s advisers back then was Richard Holbrooke, now Obama’s top civilian adviser on Afghanistan. Clearly he knows quite a bit about stirring up Muslims, and someone should ask him about the brilliant decision to give heat-seeking Stinger rockets to those same fanatics who then turned them against our side, according to the recently disclosed documents. They never learn. It was Holbrooke who helped design the Vietnam-era assassination programs exposed in the Pentagon Papers and now replicated in the Afghanistan documents.

Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who risked much to make the record of the Vietnam War public, we learned about the madness that Holbrooke and others were creating. We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that passes for U.S foreign policy.

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Jonathan Littman: Doubleheader: Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong Going to Trial

Last week federal prosecutors in San Francisco announced that they will try a 46-year-old former slugger who hasn’t been in the majors for years for allegedly lying about steroids in 2003.

That would be Barry Bonds, of course, playing in the first game of what promises to be a Sports Doping Doubleheader, followed by what appears to be the certain trial of Lance Armstrong, the champion 38-year-old cyclist who just bombed at his last Tour de France.

If Armstrong needed evidence that the federal investigation into alleged fraud and sports doping on the US Postal team was not going away any time soon, here it is. While the Armstrong grand jury is only now getting underway in Los Angeles, the grand jury that swept up Bonds was convened seven years ago — back during the first term of President George W. Bush.

The lesson for Lance is that if the Bonds case is any indication the government treats the doping trials of superstar athletes as marathons. Forget about Armstrong’s famed endurance in winning seven Tour de France’s. Armstrong may have to out pedal his pursuers for nearly a decade.

Back in the spring of 2009, the government all but threw in the towel in the perjury case against Bonds. On the eve of trial, prosecutors appealed a court ruling, seeming to abandon the long running case.

Last Friday those same prosecutors went before judge Susan Illston, and asked for a court date. The Bonds trial is now set for March of 2011, right before the baseball season. Prosecutors lost their motion to introduce what they thought was their strongest evidence that Bonds might have lied about drugs — alleged positive steroid tests — because they couldn’t prove they were Bond’s tests.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t turn up the heat.

Greg Anderson, Bonds’ former trainer, previously went to jail for a year on contempt charges, for refusing to testify about the tests. Prosecutors have made it clear that they will ask that he be jailed again if he refuses to talk. Last year twenty federal agents raided Anderson’s mother-in-law’s home in a crude attempt to pressure him to testify.

Armstrong and his lawyers should expect anything and everything. BALCO The Sequel will likely prove that prosecutors and investigators will go to any expense and all lengths to try and convict a superstar for sports doping.

Former sluggers charged with lying about using performance-enhancing drugs or washed up champion cyclists who allegedly used them while riding on the U.S. Postal team, are destined for a long, inevitable prosecution.

Trials of cheating in sports are played by different rules. As Armstrong and his lawyers have already seen, the first trial will be a slow stealth attack in the media by government witnesses. Floyd Landis and Greg LeMond, both likely witnesses before the grand jury, have been leaking their stories steadily to the press.

The Bonds case has been riddled by criminal leaks by the federal government, as well as by Troy Ellerman, a defense attorney. Ellerman was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for leaking grand jury material to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The government no doubt will say there’s a difference. Ellerman leaked what the witnesses told the grand jury, while Landis and LeMond appear to be leaking in advance what they are going to tell the grand jury.

The show goes on.

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