Whereas conventional forms of collective action, they argue, are reasonably predictable based on demographic information, the hyper interactivity of social media amplifies the role of individual personality as a dominant variable in outcomes that resemble viral outbreaks of collective action of a very unpredictable kind.
He refers to a book by Helen Margetts and others.
The fading of the Constitution means that the political vehicle has lost its brakes. Davis argues that social media have put the mob in the driver’s seat. He does not think it will end well.
You may find the entire essay interesting.
I’m pretty fine fighting these battles in the streets…maybe because I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. But when they get the bulwarks of government on their side that is where the problem starts for me.
Btw, did anyone really think that elites would do anything other than respond to incentives? It seems inconceivable to me today.
I have mixed feelings on the essay. I think a more important point about social media which strangely went unmentioned in the essay, probably because it’s a more banal observation, is that Twitter, et al, has a tendency to increase social discord and tribal conflict just because people say stuff online without any repercussions that they’d never say in public because it’d very likely cause a fistfight (or worse), so there’s a lot of vitriol aimed at various outgroups that gets carried over into real life, via, for example, voting patterns. I think the “contagion effect” of social media is a little overblown. For example:
../there appeared to be emerging a profoundly co-dependent symbiosis between a powerful global mono-culture of the Network and a retrenchment of increasingly extreme localized cultural identities offering cultural refuge for those without access to the powerful and hegemonic inner circles of information flows. The Islamic Fundamentalist, the Christian Culture Warrior, and regional independence movements are all examples of those on the outside seeking an alternative source of identity in a global mono-culture…
I think it’s important to note that this is all mediated by, well, the medium. That is, virtual communities are not real communities. They’re still just strangers situated hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other exchanging what are often pretty banal sentiments and ideas amongst each other. As such, the real world infuence they wield is necessarily limited unless, like ISIS, you can actually convince significant numbers of people to relocate somewhere like Syria, so that an online mob becomes a real physical mob. I wouldn’t count on that happening too often, though. I suppose you could point to the millions of people flooding into Europe these days as a counterpoint, which is fair, but those are not political actors. They’re just economic migrants. Plenty of those around prior to Twitter.
Far from losing its brakes, social media has made them immovable through hyper partisanship.
Frankly, the problem isn’t social media as much as mainstream media. Social media is a whole bunch of very little storms in a whole bunch of very little teacups. It is simply the sheer laziness of mainstream media reporting these as news that makes it a big deal. “The Twitter is abuzz” isn’t news until reporters and editors too lazy to find real news calls it news.
I’m reminded of the most retweeted photo a few years back. That a few hundred thousand people were interested enough in it to spend 15 seconds sending it out again wasn’t news. That it showed up on the front page of 40 million newspapers the next morning was.
The Twitter peasants are revolting! What I find the missing of Gurri thesis is there has always been revolting peasants everywhere and frankly social media is a fairly social acceptable of making your statements. The modern US has had minimal political violence (as do all developed nations) and twitter reaction causes less damage than race riots, 1919 strikes or whiskey rebellion. (Or a Civil War, 1848 revolts or even WW1.) Additionally, look at Brazil in which the leader is being impeached and the violence is still minimal. If this happened 40 years ago in South America, there would various coups and a possible large scale Civil War.
Again I say the biggest contradiction of the conservative is how do you build strong collective action with strong libertarian economist. How do you build the local church when the factory moved away?