To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and blogging are truly revolutionary tools of communication and expression that have brought so many new and compelling voices to light. At their best, they're changing the nature of political communication and news. But at their worst, they can become addictive substitutes for real action. How often have you heard lately: "Oh, I tweeted about that." Or "I posted that on my Facebook page." Really? In most cases, that's about as impactful as firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy. Unless you get out of Facebook and into someone's face, you have not acted. And, as Syria's vicious regime is also reminding us: "bang-bang" beats "tweet-tweet" every day of the week.
Tom Friedman echoes a sentiment--about the limits of a "Facebook/Twitter"-based political action-- that had been expressed by Malcolm Gladwell a while ago.
Friedman writes of how the Facebook-inspired Arab Spring fizzled out into a winter of futility and chaos and the protestors who organized the exit of President Hosni Mubarak, could not rally around a single viable candidate for the presidential elections in Egypt. The two candidates--Mohamed Morsi Ahmed Shafiq, of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak regime--are vestiges of the old order, not a break from it.
Seems like Facebook politics cannot compete with the proven effectiveness of real, "brick and mortar" politics.
But to bemoan the failure of Facebook and Twitter to bring about durable, structural change, is as pointless as raising it to the stature of something more than what it is--mere conduits of (human) communication.
Didn't Karl Marx say "base" and "superstructure?" Where real action is concerned, Social Media is neither base nor superstructure, but a super(fluous)structure without which society won't wobble.
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