On Friday, I wrote about Friendfactor, an organizing tool used in the successful battle for gay marriage in New York State. Friendfactor combines social media and real-world friendship to motivate people to get active. Instead of getting an e-mail from a group asking you to support a political goal, you get one from a close friend or family member asking you to “help me get my full rights.” Friendfactor is particularly interesting because it seems to offer a solution to one of the biggest obstacles in using social media for political change: people need close personal connections in order to get them to take action — especially if that action is risky and difficult.
So far, the idea of Facebook Revolution has been a great example of wishful thinking by the digerati.
This is why I am so skeptical of the much-discussed phenomenon of Facebook Revolution, and why Friendfactor is intriguing. “Facebook Revolution” is shorthand for the use of digital technology in creating sweeping social change in repressive societies. The idea has gotten a huge amount of attention. People in the West began referring to Iran’s 2009 uprising as the Twitter Revolution. Egypt’s hundreds of thousands of young democracy activists were supposedly organized via Facebook.
So far, the idea of Facebook Revolution has been a great example of wishful thinking by the digerati. In real life, the phenomenon hasn’t held up. The uses of Twitter in Iran were particularly exaggerated, as the messages that caught the attention outsiders were in English. In Egypt, a national strike beginning April 6, 2008 (hence the name of the April 6 Youth Movement) announced on Facebook was a failure — disorganized, unsure of its tactics, quickly repressed once it stepped offline and into the streets." More at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/friends-in-revolution/
