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Car Free In Hoboken and some links

Hoboken, NJ.  My stomping ground in undergrad.  Hoboken was the heart of my Saturday nights my junior and senior years. Let me apologize now to all the people living in those upstairs apartments that my friends and I probably woke up as we stumbled out of Black Bear or Scotland Yard.   Now that I’m [more] grown up,  let’s recognize Hoboken for something else:  The Surrender Your Permit program, a city effort to promote car free living.  Sometimes carrots do a better job than a stick.

IBM’s Many Eyes program is a data visualization tool which goes beyond charts and graphs and helps make complex data meaningful and intuitive.

Eric Fischer has made maps of almost every major U.S. city by race.

The New Yorker has an article by Malcolm Gladwell about why social media is ineffective at creating lasting social change. Would your 200 facebook “friends” really be willing to help you change the world?

And Vanity Fair has an interview with John Lennon at 70.

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Related posts:

  1. Car Free Day in Baltimore and some links
  2. How to Become Car Free And Not Become Annoying
  3. Q and A with Anna Ricklin
  4. People On The Streets
  5. Q and A: Jessica Keller, Director of Service Development, MTA
Oct 10th, 2010
by Mark.

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  • Anonymous

    I don’t agree with Gladwell on really any of his points…
    1) There were plenty of folks who disagreed with Martin Luther King’s approach to social change. He wasn’t the “unquestioned authority” – maybe in mainstream fables, but not in actual history – where there were other groups that advocated for more risky, violent approaches to social change (Black Panthers, for example). And then there are many folks who argue to this day that we didn’t go far enough, largely due to King’s conciliatory approach.
    2) Large, hierarchical organizations are adverse to risk. It isn’t that they are better insulated from risk due to being better organized. It’s that that actively make decisions to mitigate and control risk to preserve the status quo. And this is the problem with using formal organizations as vehicles for social change. Social change takes risk. And formal organizations take a lot of institutional support and legitimacy that is removed when such organizations do risky things.
    3) Most of these membership-based organizations from the civil rights movement have become increasingly irrelevant as they’ve organized (NAACP is largely irrelevant).
    4) The strength of social ties is not really related to the ability of groups to execute effective social change strategies. There is plenty of research on this if you’re interested. As an example, riots can be an extremely effective tool to motivate social change and the threat of rioting did more for the civil rights movement than did Martin Luther King, who was granted a lot of legitimacy by the state for his moderate approach (as compared to the rioters). Riots are situations where extremely weak social organization exists for coordinated activity.
    5) Gladwell primarily deals with business and media audiences, who are enamored by social media in a way that is not relevant to the not-for-profit and social movement world outside of elitist D.C.. So his message is lost on the aging baby boomers at local CDCs who struggle to understand web organizing. The problem here is different: getting them understanding how social media can liberate organizations from traditional communications constraints – including gaining the legitimacy of the mainstream media and reaching sneezers.
    6) Not sure about social media being “consensus driven”.

    I could say more, but I strongly disagree. No, your 200 Facebook friends aren’t going to save the world on their own. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t advantages to using social media for motivating action, breaking news, and getting the word out virally to using traditional media or even political canvassing.

    The problem with how organizations perceive social change is not in the communications tools they prefer or in the strength in their social ties, but in the fact that formal organizations are perceived to be the center of social change – and that their lack of resources constrain effective action. Not so…

    Indeed, Gladwell is repeating conventional pieties with a Web 2.0 spin. The advocates of decentralized, risky, and spontaneous action have been in the minority for 50 years.

  • Mark

    King was also a charismatic leader who spent numerous nights in jail, was physically attacked, and risked losing everything. he wasn’t the unquestioned authority, but his actions brought injustices to light for the world to see. True mobilization, true movements are not safe and cannot be won on the couch. But you’re right that established institutions are risk adverse. During the Montgomery bus boycotts the grassroots MIA was created with the sole purpose of getting people off the buses and garnering media attention. No established org would ever do this. Could this thing have been mobilized today through social media? Maybe yes, maybe no. Gladwell makes a good point that donating a few bucks online is not a sacrifice. It does not spur people to action like, say, footage of the Selma to Montgomery marches.

    Hierarchical orgs may be risk adverse, but leader-less orgs are easily diluted and lack the conviction that comes from a true leader. There are huge advantages to social media, but Gladwell has a point that there are limits to the dedication you have to people, ideas or injustices which you’ve never encountered face to face.

  • Anonymous

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