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dot com. sixty. leave. to. the end of the lead story. the subtlety of the leg below and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle is collectivism replace an eating destroying meaningful social activism from the arab spring to the pony two thousand and twelve fiasco the power in reach of social networking such as facebook you tube

and twitter is undeniable but are these media themselves becoming the message and can clicking and sharing change the world. the educate the soul. to cross-talk collectivism i'm joined by alex halladay in new york is president of the association of internet researchers also in new york we have john perry barlow he is co-founder of the electronic frontier foundation and a fellow at harvard law school's berkman center for internet and society and in stockholm we got to get a lot of ink he is a media firas internet critic and author of networks without a cause all right gentlemen this is cross-eyed that means you can jump in anytime you want to gird if i go to you first in stockholm can clicking and sharing change the world. well in itself it's might not be very meaningful but from a perspective of social movements it's really interesting what comes after the

residue how it brings people together what we call you know organized networks they are going to replace the old forms of political parties and trade unions and these are you know dense forms of organized. heavily supported by networked technologies that are somewhat smaller units than what we see now you know what we see now is television spectacle you know if for instance at. coney two thousand and twelve so i'm more interested in what comes after ok after if i go to alex i mean i think that's one of the things everyone else is asking too because you know what is the sustainability because you can get all excited about kony two thousand and twelve and you can click and you can share and then i have absolved i did my bit you know and you can brag about it if you want and you can share and show how it's important

to you and then you just go on to your daily business i mean it's about sustainability isn't it. well it may be i mean you can say that you go about your daily business but the fact is that those who have done this have changed their attention in some way right now attending to something that they wouldn't have done otherwise some people are suggesting that they would be doing something rather than watching this but i suspect they would be watching something else they would be watching you know reality television instead so there is this level of awareness that sustains some of the core members of a social movement and i think that's important and i might take a slight. some slight difference with carrots thought the the outcome or the residue of these interactions is important i think that the actual interactions are the outcome and that is that politics happens through discourse and so that if we have a new way of discussing things online that that can be the residue itself and that's very interesting when you think about that john because it's like the media is the

message we go back to the very beginning of television. well first of all i don't think of the internet generally speaking as a medium it's more like an environment and i think that matters ok because part of what's going on here is people who are otherwise isolated in opinion and there are fearful of that opinion being divulged in their context are suddenly made aware of the fact that many other people share that opinion they have a place that they can gather and find out that they're not alone that makes a huge difference now and they're also sharing it with a whole bunch of armchair revolutionaries and i've been one in some of these cases but it's an interesting case where the armchair revolutionaries can actually make a difference in the sense that ok john just you know i would be contrary you know what is what is the difference ok just to be contrarian what is the difference a difference that but the difference is that being aware of what's going on on the ground in a pretty granular way makes it possible to deliver the people to the people on the

ground tools that make it easier for them to conduct the revolution that they're engaged in but also i mean i think i want to say something about the coming two thousand and twelve when we talk a lot about it go ahead which i passed on to i passed on to my followers with a certain amount of skepticism i mean is the greatest piece of propaganda filmmaking since strength of the will there's no question. and i've been to i've been to uganda been to northern uganda i know a lot about what has been going on there. and what's going on in the central african republic and that part of the congo and i think even though i had i knew that this was a. this was a very shallow set of insights into it it created this storm of discussion where i think now an awful lot more people are aware of what's going on there you know it's not just about i mean because what do you think of i mean i mean if thing is if

there's been an enormous amount of discussion and criticism of that documentary but how much should people know to learn more about of course if i can go to you because maybe because of the the way it works on facebook and other places people realize oh it was a scam but nobody really knows why it was a scam you know what i mean. it wasn't precisely the. future you know a lot of different people will be able to claim. it was their contribution does that to the arrest of kone you know there are now five thousand troops from the african union there are the obama advisers there's the ugandan army there's the colony twenty twelve campaign itself there is there's a lot. of question it's kind of important you don't so you still think this documentary has not been discredited in a broader scheme of things i mean we have to discredit it i mean being media

critics but in the larger scheme of things that hasn't been discredited well maybe deliverance and a campaign but we need to separate that from the situation on the ground and there's also a lot of other things happening in northern uganda and across the border you know. things have been happening there over the last ten years so yes also in this is essentially a lot will happen ok john go ahead jump in. said suddenly a lot of people are becoming aware of what's happened to the seven eight who used to be here i mean he was a hero of mine i met with him back in the mid ninety's i thought he was the answer to the future and he's turned into the usual problem and having there be a large amount of public opinion that feels that way is going to have an effect on american policy with regard to uganda and i think that's helpful. now let's what do

you think about ok alex if i can go to you i mean i can go back to this is spain a delivery of it because again i'd like to stress the point all of us look at it very carefully and look we have our own criticisms but in the in the popular imagination the i mean it was one hundred million clicks i mean people still do you think people still believe that this kind of like fairy tale documentary it was made and it will have an impact on this not at all sure i mean there were always tells it or not i mean you know it's a question of how do you still let's go ahead alex first there alex first. john's absolutely right it wasn't a fairy tale it was a story and we always tell stories that's what we do in the media and that's true of social media as well as kind of the traditional mainstream media i mean i know i went into a classroom two nights ago to talk to undergraduates and and most of the people in the room had never heard of the l. or a county before the video and i know that that's kind of scary but with one hundred million people viewing it i suspect it's a large proportion of that hundred million and so again it's

a small slice of attention but they're attending to it and most of them had not only had heard of it but also had heard of the controversy over the over the video and so i think that more discussion is a good thing ok john do you think we'll see the repeat of invisible children because he next group of people to try to do something like they're going to be a lot more careful. well you know i think that was actually such a triumph i mean propaganda the not just anybody is capable of doing such a thing and also i think we're you know that was one of the last great gasps of broadcast media on the net. i think increasingly you you'll see things there that are much more granular in the way that they parade and are trying to build movements that have substance around issues that are that are easier to to relate to i mean the fact is that in this particular instance the bad guy in

question is in a place where it's really very very difficult to ferret him out and he's also not as dangerous as he used to be but the problem remains i mean there have been more people killed in the eastern congo in the last decade than world war one and you know we're not paying very much attention to that fact ok so i mean to me i mean will you could say the same thing about the palestinians ok i mean you know you don't have a film like that goes viral you know you don't need an agreement to go ahead no no no i think it's good for the israeli palestinian conflict that it's somehow not not so centrally convert i mean the palestinians would love to have the film be invisible palestinian which. i i don't know if if it would really benefit. i really doubt because. this is a really complex situation and well no different than you can do it no different

than you can well really oh it's different from uganda all right i think i think it's very different. cities i want to thank i commend hang on alex go ahead jump in. yeah ethan zuckerman makes the argument that we really should be paid imus rather than special be paying attention to syria and so if you yeah if you do syria maybe that's the but i mean this is this ends up being that there will be a lot of people who suggest that attention should be diverted to something else the truth is that invisible invisible children despite the sort of problems with the presentation it is certainly a piece of propaganda has captured a large portion of the attention and there will be people who say that our attention i would argue that our attention to be in the united states more directly approaching questions of what i was going on in afghanistan so there will be this question of where attention should be that the truth is that invisible children managed to do this when they have a a media piece that drew attention to

a particular problem and i think that that is a model that people will try to to emulate jon you want to say something before we go to break go ahead the other thing is that there she's me there are a lot of people on the planet who are online now a lot and that's a great many people they can have their attention focused on any number of different things it's not ok i'm looking at the central african republic which means i can't think about syria there are plenty of people thinking about syria. and you know for that matter i would i would be surprised if you're going to jump in here to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on like this of state party. you know sometimes you see

a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then he lives something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

ok. welcome to crossfire thank you to all about dramatically we're talking about new social media and activism. ok. ok john i'd like to go back to you let me be this i'm always the cynic on my own

program here this is all about marketing it's about selling stuff it's selling bracelets and it's making yourself feel good about yourself that you made a contribution to something and you where if it's white or pink or blue and you wear it on your wrist and it shows that you're a real activist ok but some people call that slacktivism as well. you know the problem is that it's both. people need to feel some sense of engagement i actually think that it matters if you wear something like that on your wrist it matters if you have it in addition to wear you know on your wrist you're writing letters you're trying to become informed you're actually taking an interest in the overall political dynamic all those things can count if all you're doing is tweeting about it from afar and but i wouldn't say that it makes a big difference but i do believe that one of the things that came out of that film was the realization for many people that if they really think about marketing in

a dynamic way for political causes that they may have they can start to present a lot of stuff that i think would be very helpful for people to see i mean for example if you take the israeli palestinian situation there is a huge and generally unseen mass of both moderate israelis and moderate palestinians very good that would love to be able to have the opportunity and come together in a film could do that what do you think about that that's a very interesting point go ahead. i see it more as manifestations of of certain way and these waves you could say you know are produced by the media from activist side but also from the mainstream press television and so on but the fact is there's been. the credit crunch we've had the arab spring we've had numerous scandals around weekly leaks

and anonymous recently we've had a large. movement called occupy wall street we don't know how that movement is going to manifest itself now in in the spring and you know so these are turbulent times so we don't even know what the next you know over the next weeks or months. is really going to happen so what you see is a growing awareness of these of these techniques and how to bring in people how to mobilize this is my biggest problem with all this again trying to be skeptical alex you know just because you click on a page on facebook saying you like something i still don't see the results the outcome ok because john pointed out you have to do a lot more things for that outcome again the slacktivism thing you know you're that's produced a patient in

a nanosecond. but i'll go back to something john said at the outset which is so there's a fear is the media fear is named on newman who suggests that there's a spiral of silence right those who won't speak up don't speak up in part because they don't know that others share their opinion and and i think a lot of what we see in the arab spring and elsewhere is people being aware that they are not alone in sharing this opinion so that one click that that i agree and i'll leaving aside some of the criticism of the commodification of attention i'll note that marketers have have suggested that a vote is you know a life is worth over one hundred dollars in terms of their ability to shape attention but even leaving aside that come out officiation knowing that your fellow citizen or someone else across the world is aware and shares your opinion on something provides the right it provides the environment in which people feel like they can act safely and have the support the site even if it's a silent support of

a large group of people behind them and i think that's ok alex i'm not sure i understand where it didn't work so i really just wanted to put you on the spot here is it worked when is it worked so well so i think you know asking me because i thought oh yeah i'm going to duck that spot. johnny want to react about you know just trying to you know we're going to mean i'd reason why we're doing this program because i think it's fascinating what's going on right now ok john you want to well i mean i don't mind your being skeptical i think there's plenty of reason to be but but i must say that in addition to creating a coalescing awareness that they were not alone i mean i've talked to a lot of people and met with a lot of people who've been working involved in the various arab uprisings. and the internet both twitter and facebook were extremely important in letting people know in real time where there were movements of police or army units what was going on where they could get out of the way or get into the way and that's made

a huge difference i mean you've got this command and control system that is completely horizontal and instantaneous and it's hugely cagers to the people who are using it in the dense not too ok so currently you can it's logistics versus awareness is that the difference we're at right now because i think john's got a really good point well i come back to my emphasis on new forms of organization because we know from the studies that we've done in the ninety's and later on that when you look at these so-called virtual communities there's about one percent you know who's really active if you look at coney twenty two hours and then think of one percent that really becomes involved that's a huge amount of people and we know you know that for instance in the netherlands.

i was at the meeting last week and. we could clearly see that there was a core of people there coming together who didn't know each other who were indeed young they were really young and that's also known the demographics of this video and there is a new generation. and they are using these tools like you know a second nature ok but i mean i want that we have these all these millions of young people young people involved in this leave by a bracelet right i mean again it goes back to this kind of commodification because it's hard for me to believe that a lot of teenagers understood the nuances of uganda. right but no he didn't understand the nuances of you say i'm going to war you better i mean that's. going to and i agree i mean you know. i mean this was going to get a lot of these young people and what ninety nine point nine percent of these young

people have never been to uganda alex keep going. yeah and so i you know even that step that awareness is important and again you know it's i think it's unfair to say that simply because they are becoming involved in a small way that doesn't count yeah and so i think that the pejorative of his own is unfair and i think that again that one percent of one hundred million is an important one percent and it's something that people are aware about and are willing to take action on beyond that so yes we can dismiss the ninety nine percent is what posers you know if we want to kind of take that position but nothing makes a difference in politics and so you know we we make move we make movements out of a large group of people making a change and a small group of people leading them and that's not that's not change but the internet so i think it's a little unfair to kind of to say that your activism doesn't count because it's too small what do you think john and look you know i i was on the barricades in paris

in one nine hundred sixty eight and i can tell you for a fact that there were an awful lot of people throwing rocks out there who were trying to impress their girlfriends i mean posers that's been a fundamental part of every revolutionary movement ever. kind of wasn't trying to follow it down there you go where do we go next ok because i mean because you know with this going to two thousand and twelve we probably won't see a repeat of it because we're going to be much more nuanced ok and do you think it could be i mean if we look at what's going on with the austerity in europe i mean something closer to home that people in europe can understand in america we have the occupy wall street and we have the election coming up could we see something new here i mean because i think this film even though i'm very dismissive of it it is a amazing phenomenon. well what what we see is democratize asian of the knowledge you know how to utilize these tools and if tony twenty twelve shows something you know we could narrow it down

to you know a campaign that's been very very carefully orchestrated designed and branded but you know it worked because they understood how. you tube works together with these real time tools of twitter and facebook and this awareness of how to create the snowball effect it's you know well that's i can tell you that's very very knowledgeable you know that's valuable knowledge yeah and told you weren't here so you don't you worry years then i think everybody did a lot of money if that's ok i mean the thing is i worry about is that ok i think giving attention to the children of uganda is an honorable thing even though it was done badly ok but not they're not people are not always so honorable we could use

the same kind of technique for some very negative things also and i'm thinking like the right wing in the united states the right wing in europe we can have this happen as well where you have fascism with a smile ok and i worry about that kind of thing too alex are you agreeing or disagreeing with me you know you're going to you know let me go to your i mean agreeing i just i'm not sure that. exactly. i am agreeing but isn't that the current situation. right now we have that and i did read this and i said i was we would be have some ability ok i want to go to go to john and give him the last time we really are from the below from below to do that yet john i'm going to give you the last word here in the program go right ahead what this is all about is attention. one thing to be said and didn't do you can have various moral postures on this but one thing to be said for the county two thousand and twelve video is that they gauged in a kind of emotional pornography that was unbelievably effective i mean there are

heartstrings that you can pull their kodak moments that you can get that will get people's attention riveted on an emotional plane and they did that and i have mixed feelings about it but i know that for a lot of people it takes that emotional and gauge going to work so people get better and better at doing these things and frankly in the service of the causes i care about i hope they do gentlemen fascinating discussion thank you very much many thanks and i guess sitting in new york and in stockholm thanks our viewers for watching us here to see you next time and remember rostock. can see. you can.

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