What do you get when you put a veteran of the anti-Apartheid struggle in a room with some young digital activists? A creative tension that will have profound implications for the future of civil society.
This week I went to a workshop in central Johannesburg hosted by Jay Naidoo, the former South African trade unionist and minister. Jay had brought together a bunch of web developers and self-proclaimed ‘geeks’, who were using new technologies to open up government and empower citizens, with folks from organisations such as Section 27 and Equal Education, NGOs that have a solid history of campaigning on social justice.
The encounter reminded me of the possibilities that new media opens up for civil society, but also the potential pitfalls of relationships between two different communities.
The promise is clear. Initiatives like Africa Open Data and MoJo are creating new resources for opening up official institutions and giving citizens the information they need to hold governments to account. New technologies are lowering barriers to entry for social activism (these days, a mobile is all you need to mobilise), allowing NGOS to scale up their activities and putting power back into the hands of people.
But the tensions are also clear. Many digital natives find the institutionalised nature of much of civil society anachronistic, and the idea of committing almost religiously to one cause sits uneasily with the contemporary desire and ability to pick and choose campaigns. Old social movements sought to unite communities of interest; contemporary activists rely on hyper-personalisation. Many of us used to see the world through a Marxist or feminist lens; the geeks will be using Google Glass.
On the flip side, there are worries of shallow ‘clicktivism’, of being supply- and elite-driven, of being slaves to the tool, of failing to tackle structural injustice, and so on. The worry is that online activity needs to be supported by offline action to empower communities, and this in turn requires old-school organising and at least some institutionalised structures.
How we resolve these tensions will shape what citizen action and civil society will look like in coming years. The ‘handshake’ between traditional and new forms of social activism is crucial. How well will established NGOs and social movements learn to harness cutting-edge technologies? How well will the new generation of social activists learn the lessons of past struggles and ensure that the changes they want in the world are seen through and result in genuine political empowerment?
I left the workshop thinking that South Africa, with its old generation of lefty liberationists and a new generation of clever coders, with lots of new tech but with plenty of entrenched socio-economic problems, is the perfect crucible for old struggles melding with new media. Watch this space.
