I’ve recently come across the WordPress plug-in WPBook. I think it’s great, and if you are a WordPress user and have a readership on Facebook too, I’d highly recommend it.

Basically, WPBook means that posts you want will be posted in full to a Facebook app, and comments that are made on FB or your WordPress site will be reflected across both platforms. This, I think, is the key reason I went for it as it can be frustrating when people start commenting and conversing on two separate sites without proper integration. Obviously this requires people to agree to using the app, so we’ll see how that goes.

Once you’ve installed it, you are guided through the process of setting up a Facebook app, which is fairly simple but requires some attention to detail – so follow the instructions carefully. Then it’s a pretty straight-forward set-up, and the settings are fairly self-explanatory.

I’ve not got a Facebook ‘page’ as such – can’t really say I like them – so I’m hoping that the App will allow people to follow this blog right from within Facebook. Be good to know how people find it.

I also use the plug-in WP to Twitter, which creates a tweet from your post, which you can fully customise within the ‘new post’ page. I also have ‘Selective Tweets‘ activated on Facebook, which means that tweets with a #fb tag are automatically posted to my wall too. Ideally I’ll be able to stop using that for actual blog posts, as people will get notifications from the app, but we’ll just see how things pan out.

Anyway, hope there’s something helpful for people – and if you’ve got a better system going, or think FB pages are better than apps, would love to hear it.

I want to retain a healthy skepticism about the power of Twitter and other social networks to bring about substantive change. There has been a lot of hype about the Green revolution in Iran, and whether it was tweeting that caused it, and I’d be tempted to side with Malcolm Gladwell – substantive change comes through physical, not virtual interaction.

But with the recent events in Egypt, and the emerging situation in Libya, I’ve been thinking about the nature of change again, especially in relation to the ideas I outlined in The Complex Christ (UK) / Signs of Emergence (US), in which I argue that top-down revolution is to be resisted in favour of bottom-up evolutionary change. Why? Because top-down revolution is classically associated with power struggle and violence, whereas bottom-up evolutionary change has usually been about bit-by-bit change, which can prevent bloodshed.

This may apply more in a corporate or ecclesiastic setting, but within nation states it may be that the nature of struggle is different, especially if there is an oppressive dictatorship which stifles even the lowest level evolving changes.

However, I do think that there is a general principle at work here: change occurs when normal people are given the opportunity to communicate with one another, unmediated by the powers that be. It is irrelevant whether that is Twitter or Facebook or otherwise. What is important is not information dissemination, but shared conversation. Not about ‘this is the news’ but ‘this is where we’re going to meet to make the news.’ Mubarak was toppled because people spoke to one another and decided together that enough was enough. If power-politics is about ‘Divide and Rule’ then social media is the antithesis of this. It is about ‘Unite and Change’ and though these networks themselves did not bring down the government, they facilitated the huge protests and encampments that did.

This, I believe, is how we can see a line joining the revolution in Egypt to the whole emerging church movement: things happen within seemingly dead and immobile institutions when people begin to talk to another and believe that a new way is possible. I don’t believe that it is coincidence that the rise of the internet was paralleled with the rise of the emerging church movement. It wasn’t that the internet made a new way possible, but it did give permission to new forms of connection and communication: people were able to disseminate ideas and discover that they were not the only ones feeling a particular way.

I think this has always been the case, and part of the core code of the gospel is this base-level communication. Jesus didn’t send out edicts or write proclamations. He simply walked around and spoke to people. The message of Pentecost is not about fire-power, but simply this: speak to one another in language you can understand.

I’m optimistic that social media – if it can escape the grip of promoted tweets and constant advertising (which I’m not sure it can) – will continue to be a powerful tool to make powerful structures more accountable. Not because information will be shared, but because people will simply be able to share how they are feeling, and work to act together.

One reason for this optimism is because we can already see how the powerful are worried. In a bizarre move, the US has tried to gain access to information about Tweeters connected to Wikileaks – at the same time as Hilary Clinton called for ‘internet repression’ to cease. It’s clear they are concerned. And that’s got to be good for all of us.

Connected to the previous post about Gladwell’s article on ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,’ I’m really excited about the next Apple event, which is coming up on 13th October. Dr Luke Bretherton will be leading a discussion on social media and social action, asking whether Facebook and Twitter have anything to add to community organising and political activism, or if the 1.4 million people who’ve joined the ‘Save Darfur’ group are wasting their time, and fooling themselves.

Details here. Good beer and food. You should be there!

Excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, casting a sceptical eye over the optimistic view that social networks can and do lead to increased social action. His argument is not that they cannot have a good impact, but that the sort of impact they might have is very different from the hard work of political activism that brought about the end to segregation.

Old style activism depended on ‘strong ties’ – people who probably knew one another, and were very committed to a single cause, with their lives and values tied up in it. Whereas…

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.

But weak ties rarely lead to high-risk activism. Why? Because high-risk activism is hard. Gladwell notes the example of a bone-marrow campaign which went viral through social networks:

Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

His conclusion is something we need to take careful note of:

Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

For an community committed to change, to conversion – whatever that means – that’s an important lesson. Real sacrifice will never happen online.

This is actually going to be part of the focus of the next ‘Apple‘ event on 13th October: Dr Luke Bretherton looking at Social Media and Social Action. More details soon, but put the date in the diary – it’s going to be excellent.

Works best in full screen… click here.

Very interesting conversation last night between Steven Johnson – author of brilliant books such as The Ghost Map, Emergence (for which I owe him a huge debt) and The Invention of Air – and Brian Eno – who defies description or categorization.

They covered a lot of ground over the evening, but perhaps the best line that I came away with was Eno quoting GA Cohen who said:

‘It’s not that socialism doesn’t work, it’s just that we haven’t developed the social tools to make it work yet.‘

Cohen died a couple of years ago, and I wonder what he would have made of the rise of Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. Personally, I think he’d have been really interested in the potential that they have, and I wonder if he, as I did, would have mulled on that quote and wondered if actually socialism might become more realised with the improved social technologies that we increasingly have available.

I’ve been of the opinion that people all basically start out socialist, it’s just that most realise quite quickly just how impossible it is to put into practice, and turn more conservative in their middle years as they have children and look to increase their own wealth and security.

But perhaps a technologically-funded socialism might actually allow things to work a little more effectively. What’s clear is that if it ever is, it’s not going to be the perennially silly, ad-driven crap-stream that is the current state of Facebook. But here’s hoping.

Oh dear, things don’t get any better for this calamitous administration. Seems like he didn’t understand how Twitter works – replies are viewable by everyone.

The account is now deleted, and we can probably assume that date in the diary has been too. Oops.

HT ToryBear via DizzyThinks.

My view is that while we do create tools, our tools do end up recreating us aswell. The internal combustion engine was a human invention, but its invention did have a profound effect on us too.

In his book Exclusion and Embrace theologian Miroslav Volf talks about creation in Genesis as a process of ‘separation and binding’: the water and the land are separated, humanity is bound in stewardship of the earth. Nic disagrees, but I think that this is a helpful metaphor for a good relationship to technology: we are bound to it – we cannot live without it – but we are also separate from it.

Now, using the ideas covered in the series of posts on ‘Bad Faith’, we might view this from another angle: our relationship to technology should have both facticity and transcendence, and it is when this duality collapses on either side that we see problems occuring. In a recent interview an Oxford Professor of Neurology expressed real concerns about the effect increased screen-time could have on our brains. Without practice at decoding the subtle and complex messages in face-to-face communication (nuance, tone, context, pheromones, gestures) our brains will perform worse in this area – and this could be a viscious cirle as embarrassment could lead to further withdrawal.

But, in my view, there is a parallel danger. By experiencing so many more relationships through media like Facebook or Twitter we risk collapsing the complexities of ‘the other’ into pure facticity: they become seen by us as no more than the sum of their status updates, and we also risk seeing ourselves in that way too. As Pete has pointed out, we are much more mysterious than that.

The danger works the other way too. Our status updates don’t mean nothing – they do communicate something of who we are, and to ignore them and claim separation from them is to collapse into pure transcendence – we are above all that.

Neither is true. We are separate from our social networks (virtual and ‘real’) but bound to them too. The art of living in technological ‘good faith’ is going to be negotiating the line between these two states, and avoiding the temptation to collapse either side.

Don’t want to.

Hope I never will.

Ditto any other ‘microblogging’ nonsense.

It’s ever-more candyfloss communication in an age of increasingly vacuous relationships.

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