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Organizing online or in the community?

I just got back from entertaining a highschool class. Their class was documentary for social change. My boss did most of the talking, but I was able to see the potential of this kind of thing. The kids were very into it, it seemed. I also realized that my contribution to this place is more technical than anything else. I always seem to come up with something to do with the web. Maybe I am missing out on working towards things like this. Organize in the community or online? I'm only one person so doing both is hard. Of coarse after it was over I said to my boss "I'll make up a website people can go to to learn about our educational programs". How much does the internet replace our outreach into the community? They are two very different places with different strategies involved in mobalizing them. Maybe...just maybe...even though I don't want to admit it, the web is not the answer to everything. Maybe.

Comments

depends on the community

well, insofar as the internet is a very good mobilizing tool for white upperclass men in the global north, organizing those communities online, even exclusively, might make a lot of sense.

but if the community organizing has any interest in diverse communities or subaltern communities, the internet will only be a tool that leads to real-world action -- a tool that is not accessible (because of economic, language or educational barriers) to everyone.

even leaving that aside, though, i'd say just on a philosophical basis that you actually have to be present within a community before you can hope to organize it; that ultimately the goal should be for self-organization. the road to hell is paved with good-intentioned humanitarians eager to "save" a community from itself. most of the sociological studies of social movements in the last half-century, from saul alinsky to paolo freire to starhawk and the zapatistas, have emphasized being fully present and part of a community before one does any sort of "organizing." (other people, like frances fox piven, would say that people can only effect change within the groups of which they are a part, because the most effective knowledge is a kind of foucauldian communal self-knowledge...but that is a discussion for another day...)

Interesting

That's very interesting. This seems to go back to my problem of convincing my superiors that it is worth the time and resources to work on outreach on the web even when it does not necessarily lead to butts in the seats at our programs. If anything, social networking tools are good tools for the organizERS, if they are not necessarily useful to the community itself. The internet becomes a community onto itself almost seperate completely from the real world community, it has different rules, different people, and different potetial uses.

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