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 communiquà ©s 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. 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.
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