It’s hard to tire of Malcolm Gladwell’s stat that, from the millions of people who joined the “Save Darfur” Facebook group, the average donation was nine cents. “That’s better than nothing!” cry the social media fans – an argument that assumes none of those people had a charitable bone in their body before Facebook came along. Far more likely is that many of those people wanted to do something charitable and where previously that would have required them to write a check – for far more than nine cents – they can now satisfy their conscience with a simple click.
-Paul Carr, NSFW: 404 Alcohol Not Found (Or, Social Media is Overrated, but it’s Helped me Stay Sober), TechCrunch, 11/27/2010.
This is why people like Marshall Ganz, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who spent 16 years mobilizing for civil rights in Mississippi and working on the ground with Cesar Chavez in California, can’t stand internet “organizing.”
But if the Save Darfur folks had followed up more effectively with those who had joined the online campaign, those clicks might have turned into action. The internet is merely a tool—the mistake comes from thinking of it is an end in itself.
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