social media,

social change
& the bible

All Souls Langham Place

London
30 November 2010 (10.30am- 4.00pm)
Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory (by
a margin of nearly 200 electoral votes and 8.5 million popular
votes) by converting everyday people into engaged and
empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through
social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online
video. The campaign’s proclivity to online advocacy is a
major reason for his victory.Since the election, the social
media programs adopted by Obama’s transition team have
foreshadowed significant changes in how Obama, as
president, will communicate with – and more importantly –
through the mass of supporters who were collected,
cultivated and channeled during the campaign. Obama
wants to be the first president to govern with BlackBerry in
hand; he will certainly be the first with a legion of 13 million
advocates at his fingertips.

TheSocial Pulpit Barack Obamaʼs Social Media Toolkit, Edelman

“Without Twitter the people of Iran
would not have felt empowered and
confident to stand up for freedom and
democracy,”
Mark Pfeifle, a former US national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter
to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“There was no Twitter Revolution inside
Iran....Western journalists who couldn’t
reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people
on the ground in Iran simply scrolled
through the English-language tweets post
with tag #iranelection....Through it all, no
one seemed to wonder why people trying
to coordinate protests in Iran would be
writing in any language other than Farsi.”
Golnaz Esfandiari
Social media gives us the illusion of
action...but also drains energy from
real action. #Apple8 Wed Oct 13 20:41:05 2010 via Twitter for
iPad @KesterBrewin

“Displacement means you accept a

fantasy of political participation rather
than the real thing.”
Luke Bretherton 2010
What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights
movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people
they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than
dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism... is a
“strong-tie” phenomenon.
Malcolm Gladwell
The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social
media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you
may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for
keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why
you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

Malcolm Gladwell
When networks of elites in overlapping fields of culture and overlapping spheres
of social life come together with their varied resources and act in common
purpose, cultures do change and change profoundly. Persistence over time is
essential; little of significance happens in three to five years. But when cultural
and symbolic capital overlap with social capital and economic capital and, in
time, political capital, and these various resources are directed toward shared
ends, the world, indeed changes.
James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World, Oxford University Press, (2010), p.43
Text
Social media is a tool to seek the
welfare of our cities by informing &
strengthening a movement of grass
roots committed communities.
 Social change, social media and the Bible

We
Exist in Exile to
Bless Babylon not
Pressgang our Politics