I just listened to a very interesting segment from the TED Radio Hour with Zeynep Tufekci titled “Why are Social Causes Easy to Launch but Hard to Win?” I’ve embedded the segment down below if you want to hear the whole thing. In the segment, Tufekci points out that social media has made it possible for large-scale movements to get started at lightning-speed. Yet, despite the ease at which movements can be started, many fail to bring about any lasting change.
I immediately think about movements like Occupy Wallstreet and the recent Ferguson and Baltimore protests that devolved into all-out riots. Tufekci makes the point that with the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movements, things moved much slower which actually facilitated their causes. People didn’t have Twitter and Facebook to quickly rally support. Instead, they had to go out and physically meet supporters in the community, network with other organizations, and slowly plan out logistics. What technology is failing to do is bring communities together to think together and organize and plan better. How can you have a well-thought-out plan and have everyone on the same page about an issue when you’ve only known each other for two or three days?
My favorite part of the segment was this part taken from her TED talk:
I interviewed a top official from the ruling party in Turkey, and I asked him, “How do you do it?” They too use digital technology extensively, so that’s not it. So what’s the secret? Well, he told me. He said the key is he never took sugar with his tea. I said, “what has that got to do with anything?” Well, he said, his party starts getting ready for the next election the day after the last one, and he spends all day every day meeting with voters in their homes, in their wedding parties, circumcision ceremonies, and then he meets with his colleagues to compare notes. With that many meetings every day, with tea offered at every one of them, which he could not refuse, because that would be rude, he could not take even one cube of sugar per cup of tea, because that would be many kilos of sugar, he can’t even calculate how many kilos . . . his party won two major elections within a year of the Gezi protests with comfortable margins.
I think the message this allegory has is that intense planning is vital to bringing about success. If you rush into things without thinking, you’re taking sugar with your tea which can result in all your good-intentions crumbling to dust. Or in the case of Ferguson and Baltimore – widespread looting and arson.