Not for the faint of heart

I really enjoyed the Malcolm Gladwell article, "Small Change" (New Yorker, Oct 4, 2010), where Gladwell talks about how activism that attempts to change the status quo is a high-risk endeavor, and, as he says, "not for the faint of heart." Gladwell uses the example of the Woolworth's sit-in in 1960 to point to the fact that the four college students who staged the sit-in had close connections to one another, in addition ot being part of much wider and well-organized group of activists who were all concerned with gaining civil rights for Blacks in the South.

Gladwell's article reminded me of witnessing first-hand the coup d'etat that took place in Mali in 1991. I was a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach English at the national teacher training college, and came to Mali right when the unrest began. I went to class one day and, once again, no one was there, so I looked around and finally found a huge crowd of students in an ampitheater. I walked in the back and was almost thrown out immediately (they thought I was a journalist) until some of my students saw me and said, "It's okay! She's our English teacher," so they let me stay, standing in the back, to see what was going on.

It happened that I'd walked in on the decisive meeting of the high school and college students, who decided collectively that they would lay down their lives to oust Moussa Traore, the military dictator who had ruled their country for 23 years. One student told me, "We have no future as it is. We have nothing to lose." I was absolutely terrified for them--I must've cried all the way home thinking that my students were about to get killed for their cause.

In the following months it was indeed the students who started the overthrow, blocking roads and protesting in the streets. They were soon joined by the working class, at which point the protests paralyzed the capital. At one juncture while marching, they were fired upon by the military, and between 300-400 people lost their lives, many of them our young students. Finally, grieving Malian mothers marched to the presidential palace, les seins nus, as a way to humiliate the soldiers who had fired upon and killed their family members, and it was at that point that the soldiers didn't fire at the mothers but rather put down their weapons, and Moussa Traore was finally deposed.

These were not people who were just texting the day before--they were peoplewho had suffered oppression for decades, and who showed extreme courage in the face of grave danger in order to change the way their society was run. They succeeded, but God was the whole thing scary.

It also made me think about what Clay Shirky said in his article, "The Political Power of Social Media Subtitle: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change" (Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb 2011), about the fact that when big change happens, it's successful when there are "governments in waiting," basically people who are ready to step in and promote the right kind of change. In Mali, Amadou Amani Toure, a military leader, stepped in and deposed Moussa Traore, and then he did something really shocking--he announced that he was setting up a transitional government, and that elections would take place in a year, and when a new president was elected (not Toure) he quite gracefully stepped out. It was the most wonderful thing! Almost unprecedented in the region at the time. And guess what? About ten years later ATT was legitimately elected President, and had since been reelected to a second five-year term.

The population was ready for that change. At the teacher training college, I supervised a number of my student's senior theses, and many of them were, in fact, interested in the civil rights leaders in the U.S. during the sixties. They were taking the lessons, even if the ideas came from books and not the internet, and applying them to their lives. Their parents had had it rough, and their future was bleak under a dictatorial regime. They were ready for change and were talking about it in school, and in their communities, and trying to figure out how they could bring about a real change within their own cultural context.

The subject of our readings is the overblown idea that social media has started recent revolutions. It hasn't. It has certainly helped to bring about worldwide awareness of political events, but the reality is that technology can't take credit--it comes organically from the evolution of a whole society. As awareness builds, and as things evolve, it just finally tips and people cross over and delve into activism, sometimes for the first time in their lives, spurred on by their family, friends and neighbors, to fight for change.

People can be influenced from the outside, but the impetus comes from within, when people are ready, and that's when you see the high-risk and often high-gain (or "nothing to lose") activism that makes people put their lives on the line. It happens, as Gladwell says, when they people have strong social ties to their fellow activists, and are well-organized. Local leaders obtain a following and are listened to and well-respected, I think, when everyone believes that they are acting in the best interests of their fellow citizens.

Social media and Internet offerings are fabulous for connecting people, and for learning more about world events, and they way people live and think throughhout the world. But they are not the trusted, intimate source that usually is the one that convinces us to do something. Ideas can help, though, and add in to help get citizens to the tipping point where they are ready to act. It would've been so fabulous back when I was teaching in Mali to have been able to look some things up, for example, about Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X when my students had questions. But you know what? They found out about them and were discussing their ideas anyway.

Imagine, though, how much more Malian students know now, and have access to, by being able to get on the Internet. Younger students can also look up information about what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, and what is now happening in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. They can look up information about their own country's history, and the succession of rulers the country has had to arrive where they are today. But in addition, they'll also hear about their own country's history first-hand from their parents and grandparents, who can tell them about the events of 1991.

As Shirky says, "A slowly developing public sphere, where public opinion relies on both media and conversation, is the core of the environmental view of Internet freedom." In Mali, Internet access is not free but it is uncensored, and so both knowledge from the Internet, radio, and TV, along with the conversations they will have with the people in their society and others will help them form their own ideas, and move things forward in a way that works for Malians.