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The revolution will not be tweeted


In his New York Times column (consider this your warning, fellow non-subscribers), David Carr considers the limits of so-called hashtag activism. Personally, I have a subtle preference for the internet's homegrown neologism, slacktivism. Money quote:
In the friction-free atmosphere of the Internet, it costs nothing more than a flick of the mouse to register concern about the casualties of far-flung conflicts. Certainly some people are taking up the causes that come out of the Web’s fire hose, but others are most likely doing no more than burnishing their digital avatars.
You probably needn't be furnished with examples of this sort of digital cause sympathizing. Charming but frightfully over-earnest youngsters align themselves with all manner of causes online. And why wouldn't they when the energy or time expenditure is that of only a mouse click. The currency of a click is pretty meagre, though, and as a result the central idea of protest, the idea of inconveniencing oneself, is largely lost on my generation. At the website of The Atlantic, Max Fisher links the love-to-hate relationship we have with the recent Kony 2012 campaign to the apparent change in American self-conceptions over the past decade. If this sentence already leaves you thinking the young Mr. Fisher has read too much into the misguided attempt to bring down a Ugandan warlord via tweet, wait until you scan the following:
We often take it for granted that American leadership is a good thing, and this has led us to some of our most destructive and misguided mistakes. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2012 Kony campaign are, in this way, not so different. Of course Iraqis want to come under the stewardship of benevolent American leadership; of course Ugandans want to be saved by the stewardship of benevolent American NGO workers. We envision the American cavalry riding in to save the day, as it truly did in both world wars and maybe in the Cold War, and we like what we see. Part of this really is benevolence, or at least the intent of benevolence. Part of it is self-aggrandizement. But it's an idea that Americans, after nearly a century of faith in the benevolence of American hegemony, seem to be questioning.
A wee bit much? I think so. (The title for this post is taken — stolen, if you will — from Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the limits of Twitter protesting. It's worth reading.)