by David Carr
It’s an important distinction in an age when you can accumulate social
currency on Facebook or Twitter just by hitting the “like” or “favorite”
button.
The ongoing referendum on the Web often seems more like a kind of collective digital graffiti than a measure of engagement: I saw this thing, it spoke to me for at least one second, and here is my mark to prove it.
But it gets more complicated when the subjects are more complicated.
Hitting the favorite button on the first episode of “Mad Men” is a
remarkably different gesture than expressing digital solidarity with
kidnapped children in Africa, but it all sort of looks the same at the
keyboard.
In the friction-free atmosphere of the Internet, it costs nothing more
than a flick of the mouse to register concern about the casualties of
far-flung conflicts. Certainly some people are taking up the causes that
come out of the Web’s fire hose, but others are most likely doing no
more than burnishing their digital avatars.
In February, the digiterati went bonkers after the Susan G. Komen
foundation (shorthanded as #Komen on Twitter) announced it was cutting
off financing for Planned Parenthood. And then #KONY2012 started popping
up in my Twitter feed and I, along with 100 million others, watched a
video about the indicted Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony.
After weeks of remaining under the radar, #TrayvonMartin began to
surface as well, with many suggesting that the people who got so frantic
about the victimization of young black males on another continent
needed to look closer to home, at the death of an unarmed black teenager
in Florida.
As a reporter, I don’t sign up for various causes, but as someone who
lives — far too much — in the world of social media, I can feel the pull
of digital activism. And I have to admit I’m starting to experience a
kind of “favoriting” fatigue — meaning that the digital causes of the
day or week are all starting to blend together. Another week, another
hashtag, and with it, a question about what is actually being
accomplished.
I ended up thinking a lot about the power and limits of digital activism
earlier this month when I was in Moscow during the Russian presidential
vote. I spent election night with Aleksei Navalny,
a Russian blogger
who had become a tip of the spear in the social media campaign against
the current government. On that night, camera crews from around the
world swirled around him and it seemed as if anything was possible.
But by the next day, it was clear that Vladimir V. Putin would retain
his grip on power, and Mr. Navalny ended up posting on Twitter from
police custody when he was arrested after an opposition rally. Social
media activism may prove to be a durable force in Russian politics, but
in these early days it is no match for offline might.
Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of
Internet Freedom,” is not entirely dismissive of the Web as a political
organizing tool, but is skeptical of the motives, and power, of digital
activism.
“My hunch is that people often affiliate with causes online for selfish
and narcissistic purposes,” he said. “Sometimes, it may be as simple as
trying to impress their online friends, and once you have fashioned that
identity, there is very little reason to actually do anything else.”
Which brings us to the online campaign denouncing the fact that “Bully,”
a movie about child-on-child harassment and violence to be released
Friday, has received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of
America’s ratings board.
I have watched the evocative trailer for the movie and met the director,
Lee Hirsch. And as a parent of a 15-year-old, I have skin in the game.
On Thursday, word came that David Boies and Ted Olson, the attorneys who
were on the opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, had
joined the effort to persuade the motion picture association to change
the film’s R rating to PG-13, so that the young people most affected by
the issue could actually see the movie. Celebrities and politicians,
everyone from Drew Brees to Justin Bieber, have weighed in, as have more
than 460,000 people who’ve
signed an online petition demanding that the rating be changed.
The petition was started by a teenager, Katy Butler, who was bullied for
being a lesbian, and has blown up huge on Twitter and elsewhere.
“We were absolutely disappointed with the rating,” Mr. Hirsch told me
Friday. “This film has been heralded and welcomed by all kinds of
education groups, and multiple school districts were planning to take
their students en masse.”
Mr. Hirsch said the petition came out of nowhere. “I got an e-mail the
day after it started and I have watched it rising since,” he said.
Generally the way people express support for a film is by paying for a
ticket. If “Bully” were seen only by the people who signed the petition,
it would have a domestic gross of about $5 million. “Food Inc.,”
“Inside Job” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” all major
documentaries that landed with significant impact, never made it to the
$5 million mark.
There’s another thing to wonder about. The film is distributed by Harvey
Weinstein’s company — who I can say without irony is one of the most
talented bullies in any business — and what seems like a blossoming of
netroots has obvious commercial value to the Weinstein Company. It would
not be the first time a distributor happily courted controversy to call
attention to a film.
I called Christopher J. Dodd, the former senator who now runs the motion
picture association and who was on the receiving end of a full-fledged
Web revolt after his organization’s support of unpopular piracy
legislation in January. I expected him to suggest that all the online
petitioners had failed to grasp the nuance and importance of the ratings
system. Not so.
“These are our customers and it behooves us to listen to them,” he said.
“We had a screening in Washington and among others we had Katy Butler,
who started the petition, and she got up and spoke. I commended her for
what she had done.”
“This is the world we are going to live in as far as I can see into the
future, and we need to be part of that conversation instead of wringing
our hands,” Mr. Dodd said.
Mr. Dodd said he and Mr. Weinstein had been in steady and earnest
communication, and that he believes that some sort of compromise on the
content of the film will be reached so that young people who wish to can
see the film together — as they should — without having to hold hands
with or seek permission from their parents.
That outcome — a very traditional organization responding with an open
mind to a netroots outcry — made me think again about my own cynicism
about Web activism. Many of the folks who made the unpopular decision at
Komen are gone and the policy has been amended. Trayvon Martin’s death
is under investigation and the president is now weighing in directly.
And who knows, perhaps the Web-enabled sunlight on Joseph Kony will end
with him being brought to justice, finally.
Sure, hashtags come and go, and the so-called weak ties of digital
movements are no match for real world engagement. But they are not only
better than nothing, they probably make the world, the one beyond the
keyboard, a better place.
