tagged: Coup, Egypt, Featured, Rastis, Revolution, Tunisia, twitter

Twitter, the Revolution, and the Anonymous Gospel

Posted by Rastis in Church & Missions, News & Culture

There has been a small debate going on in certain social media circles as to the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of sites such as twitter and facebook in enacting cultural change.  On the pro-media side, they insist that these new tools can connect you instantly to a whole network of people and instantaneously communicate.  While the initial reports on Iran protests a year or so back turned out to be bogus, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are a completely different story; It is clear that social media played a key role in organizing the masses.    On the other side of the issue is Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker,  who wrote a good article on social medial and people movements.  It is long but good, well worth the read.  He says that:

“The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.”

While the internet is a great place to network on the basis of weak ties, these ties do not imply the level of commitment that true, deep relationships require or the kind of commitment that great movements demand.  Great movements might be reported on the social web, but it is unlikely that they will start there.  He continues:

“This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest”

He describes high risk activism and race sit-ins.  These kind of high-risk movements demonstrate a willingness to undergo persecution vs. the low risk commitments of social media.  So what does this mean if you are a blogger or tweeter?  Perhaps there is a third group wherein people who are already committed to a task simply find each other.  Have the right expectations.  If you are interested in connecting with other like minded people and fostering discussion, they you have found a valuable avenue.  If you are looking for some kind of sweeping people movement as a result of your blog, you will probably be disappointed.  Perhaps the only kind of activism this third group is able to muster will be merely to convince those not already dedicated to participate in a “clean-hands,” “click here if you support ‘xyz’” kind of way.  It is just this kind of activism which is wrong with my generation: a deep sense of conviction and conscience, and a lack of commitment to radically obey.  I digress…

The frenzied popularity of social media betrays a sense of disconnectedness, particularly for younger generations.  This disconnection is a result of individualism taken to its worst extremes (to the point that parents will shun their children and children their parents–can we survive as a society without fulfilling the most basic of familial obligations?).  Perhaps this explains why the postmodern generation is willing to dismiss questions of truth because focusing on truth, so they say, causes divisions.  Certainly this changing social dynamic will have implications for the gospel.  Ray Baake, in his Theology as Big as the City, says:

“The bigger the city and the more urbanized we get, the more intentionally personal and local our witness must become.  For years I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with mass-evangelism strategies that are technically, financially or millennially driven.  We can see many results today, almost instantly, but what of the bigger picture?”  Ray Bakke, A Theology as Big as the City, 136.

Cities amplify the human condition, for better or worse.  They magnify the walls between us and them, known and unknown, friends and foes, haves and have-nots, etc.  Couple these amplifications with a generation already feeling dislocated from the whole and we have a great opportunity if we address it properly.  For too long we have viewed evangelism as some king of marketing ploy wherein we can do mass drops of a gospel so removed from its narrative that it is reduced to a spiritual scratch and sniff.  We need to do what Baake says and make the gospel more personal.  We can surely “tweet” the gospel (is that the modern equivalent of a rally?), but will that change lives?  Will it make disciples?  My non-Christian friends back in the states tell me that they know when the holidays are approaching if for no other reason than the many churches around them start filling up their mailbox with fliers for various services.  What difference would it make if one of the thousands of Christians in my made this personal?

“in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us (2 Cor 5:19-20).  In the same way that God first put a face to the Word–the incarnation–he is using us in like manner.

Social media serves as a valuable tool for organizing those who are already dedicated to a common cause, but we should learn from its shortcomings as well.  We need to consider our evangelism methods and see if there are ways in which we can make them more personal to those around us.