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I saw this on the Dean Blog, and thought it was worth sharing with DUers.
I'm not sure where it came from originially, but it sort of reflects what I feel when folks on this board bitch about "the media" not getting our message out.
Michael
Lee Felsenstein ad seriatim
HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTION in three easy steps
OK, here's the method for making sweeping, positive social change.
FIRST, everybody gets a project.
Join one or start one, but the project has to be directed toward making things better. That's what's called a "positive vector".
SECOND, everybody talks with everybody else about their projects.
That's "talks with", not just "talks to" or "talks at". This sets up a "field of communication", with information flowing in all directions. It's very important to the process, and we now have the tools (the Internet and the phone system) to make communication available without much hierarchy.
THIRD, be prepared to change your project based upon what you learn by communicating about it.
This is also very important. It "closes the feedback loop" by making the communication consequential, and, with everyone's good sense, sets up a "converging system" in the general direction of the vector.
That's it. Act, especially in concert with others, communicate and re-evaluate. Repeat as often as possible. Oh, yes - keep records of what you try and what happened , both good and bad. The system needs an element of memory to function.
These days I've been looking more and more at the Sixties and what happened then. The civil rights movement was a broad-based social-change movement that made a real difference - a positive one by my standards - in how the society was structured. No one could point to one place, one organization or one leader making the decisions (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was drawn into the movement and knew he was a sacrifical offering to those who always have to believe that one person is pulling the strings).
Inside the civil rights movement it functioned pretty much as I've described above. People started projects, guided only by their morality and their belief that the US Constitution was not being lived up to. There was a lot of communication on what was happening - meetings work not just by top-down communciation but by setting up relationships among participants which provide a basis for person-to-person communication. In fact, often the best thing is to ignore the person on the podium, go outside and talk among yourselves.
And there was a lot of coming and going, of projects folding and new projects blooming. Nothing was THE big one (even the 1963 March on Washington was over at the end of the day - though the world would never be the same) and the flexibility allowed for change as things developed.
Where it all came apart was when mass media, with its hierarchical structure of owners and editors and media stars, became relied upon to "get the message out", to the detriment of person-to-person communication. This broke the feedback loop and inserted elements that directed things toward serving the interests of the media. We then got "The Sixties", a spectacular media presentation.
We don't have to do it that way, though. Establish the vector you think is right, join the field of communication and stay flexible while pushing as much energy through as you can without hurting yourelf. Change your project to be more in line with the overall vector as you sense it developing. Remember that it takes about 6 months to get something established and 18 months to 2 years to get through it. If you aren't doing something different by that time, take a long hard look at yourself and your project.
Come to think of it, don't wait till the two-year point to take that look - do it whenever you aren't doing anything else.
A tip of the hat to Kurt Vonnegut. See you in the field!
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