I’m part of a dis­cus­sion at the Pen­dle Hill con­fer­ence cen­ter out­side Philadel­phia next month. Everyone’s invited. It’s a rare chance to really bring a lot of dif­fer­ent read­ers and media pro­duc­ers (offi­cial and DIY) together into the same room to map out where Quaker media is headed. If you’re a pas­sion­ate reader or think that Quaker pub­li­ca­tions are vital to our spir­i­tual move­ment, then do try to make it out.

Youtube, Twit­ter, pod­casts, blogs, books. Where’s it all going and who’s doing it? How does it tie back to Quak­erism? What does it mean for Friends and our insti­tu­tions? Join pan­elists Charles Mar­tin, Gabriel Ehri and Mar­tin Kel­ley, along with Quaker pub­lish­ers and writ­ers from around the world, and read­ers and media enthu­si­asts, for a wide-ranging dis­cus­sion about the future of Quaker media.

We will begin with some wor­ship at 7.00pm If you’d like a deli­cious Pen­dle Hill din­ner before­hand please reply to the Face­book event wall (see http://​on​.fb​.me/​q​u​a​k​e​r​m​e​dia). Din­ner is at 6.00pm and will cost $12.50

This is part of this year’s Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions con­fer­ence. QUIP has been hav­ing to re-imagine its role over the last ten years as so many of its anchor pub­lish­ers and book­stores have closed. I have a big con­cern that a lot of online Quaker mate­r­ial is being pro­duced by non-Quakers and/or in ways that aren’t really rooted in typ­i­cal Quaker processes. Maybe we can talk about that some at Pen­dle Hill.

Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence has announced that Barry Crossno will be their new incom­ing Gen­eral Sec­re­tary. Old time blog­gers will remem­ber him as the blog­ger behind The Quaker Dharma. FGC’s just pub­lished an inter­view with him and one of the ques­tions is about his blog­ging past. Here’s part of the answer:

Blog­ging among Friends is very impor­tant.  There are not a lot of Quak­ers.  We’re spread out across the world.  Blog­ging opens up dia­logues that just wouldn’t hap­pen oth­er­wise.  While I laid down my blog, “The Quaker Dharma,” a few years ago, and my think­ing on some issues has evolved since then, I’m clear that blog­ging is what allowed me to give voice to my call.  It helped open some of the doors that led me to work for Pen­dle Hill and, now by exten­sion, FGC.  A lot of cut­ting edge Quaker thought is being shared through blogs.

I thought it might be use­ful to fill in a lit­tle bit of this story. If you go read­ing through the back com­ments on Barry’s blog you’ll see it’s a time machine into the early Quaker blog­ging com­mu­nity. I first posted about his blog in Feb­ru­ary of 2005 with Quaker Dharma: Let the Light Shine and I high­lighted him reg­u­larly (March, April, June) until the proto-QuakerQuaker “Blog Watch” started run­ning. There I fea­tured him twice that June and twice more in August, the most active period of his blogging.

It’s nos­tal­gic to look through the com­menters: Joe G., Peter­son Toscano, Mitchell San­tine Gould, Dave Carl, Bar­bara Q, Robin M, Brandice (Quaker Mon­key), Eric Muhr, Nancy A… There were some good dis­cus­sions. Barry’s most exu­ber­ant post was Let’s Begin, and LizOpp and I espe­cially labored with him to ground what was a very clear and obvi­ous lead­ing by hook­ing up with other Friends locally and nation­ally who were inter­ested in these efforts. I offered my help in hook­ing him up with FGC  and he wrote back “If you know peo­ple at other Quaker orga­ni­za­tions that you wish me to speak to and coor­di­nate with or pos­si­bly work for, I will.”

And that’s what I did. My super­vi­sor, FGC Devel­op­ment head Michael Wajda, was plan­ning a trip to Texas and I started talk­ing up Barry Crossno. I had a hunch they’d like each other. I told Michael that Barry had a lot of expe­ri­ence and a very clear lead­ing but needed to spend some time grow­ing as a Quaker–an incu­ba­tion period, if you will, among grounded Friends. In the first part of the FGC inter­view he mov­ingly talks about the ground­ing his time at Pen­dle Hill has given him.

In Octo­ber 2006 he announced he was clos­ing a blog that had become largely dor­mant. It’s worth quot­ing that first for­mal goodbye:

I want to thank those of you who chose to actively par­tic­i­pate. I learned a lot through our exchanges and I think there were many peo­ple who ben­e­fited from many of the posts you left. On a purely per­sonal note, I learned that it’s good to tem­per my need to GO DO NOW. Some of you really helped men­tor me con­cern­ing effec­tively lis­ten­ing to guid­ance and help­ing me under­stand that act­ing locally may be bet­ter than try­ing to take on the whole world at once.

I also want to share that I met some peo­ple and made con­tacts through this process that have opened tremen­dous doors for me and my abil­ity to put myself in ser­vice to oth­ers. For this I am deeply grate­ful. I feel sure that some of these ties will live on past the clos­ing of the Quaker Dharma.

Those of you famil­iar with pieces like The Lost Quaker Gen­er­a­tion and Pass­ing the Faith, Planet of the Quak­ers Style know I’ve long been wor­ried that we’ve not doing a good job iden­ti­fy­ing, sup­port­ing and retain­ing vision­ary new Friends. Around 2004 I stopped com­plain­ing (mostly) and just started look­ing for oth­ers who also held this con­cern. The online orga­niz­ing has spilled over into real world con­fer­ences and work­shops and is much big­ger than one web­site or small group. Now we see “grad­u­ates” of this net­work start­ing to take on real-world responsibilities.

Barry’s a bright guy with a strong lead­ing and a healthy ambi­tion. He would have cer­tainly made some­thing of him­self with­out the blogs and the “doors” opened up by myself and oth­ers. But it would have cer­tainly taken him longer to crack the Philadel­phia scene and I think it very likely that FGC would have announced a dif­fer­ent Gen­eral Sec­re­tary this week if it weren’t for the blogs.

Quak­erQuaker almost cer­tainly has more future Gen­eral Sec­re­taries in its mem­ber­ship rolls. But it would be a shame to focus on that or to imply that the pin­na­cle of a Quaker lead­ing is mov­ing to Philadel­phia. Many parts of the Quaker world are already too enthralled by it’s staff lists. What we need is to extend a cul­ture of every­day Friends ready to boldly exclaim the Good News–to love God and their neigh­bor and to leap with joy by the pres­ence of the Inward Christ. Friends’ cul­ture shouldn’t focus on staffing, flashy pro­grams or fundrais­ing hype.  At the end of the day, spir­i­tual out­reach is a one-on-one activ­ity. It’s peo­ple spend­ing the time to find one another, share their spir­i­tual jour­ney and share oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow in their faith.

Quak­erQuaker has evolved a lot since 2005. It now has a team of edi­tors, dis­cus­sion boards, Face­book and Twit­ter streams, and the site itself reaches over 100,000 read­ers a year. But it’s still about find­ing each other and encour­ag­ing each other. I think we’ve proven that these over­lap­ping, dis­trib­uted, largely-unfunded online ini­tia­tives can play a crit­i­cal out­reach role for the Soci­ety of Friends. What would it look like for the “old style” Quaker orga­ni­za­tions to start sup­port­ing inde­pen­dent Quaker social media? And how could our net­works rein­vig­o­rate cash-strapped Quaker orga­ni­za­tions with fresh faces and new mod­els of com­mu­ni­ca­tion? Those are ques­tions for another post.

A lot of peo­ple, include Jeanne Burns over on Quak­erquaker, are talk­ing about Mal­colm Gladwell’s lat­est New Yorker arti­cle, “Small Change: Why the Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tweeted”.

Mal­colm Gladwell’s modus operandi is to make out­ra­geously counter-intuitive claims that peo­ple will talk about enough that they’ll buy his boss’s mag­a­zine, books and bobble-head like­nesses. I find him lik­able and divert­ing but don’t take his claims very seri­ously. He’s a lot like Wired Magazine’s Chris Ander­son, his some­times spar­ring part­ner, which isn’t sur­pris­ing as they work for the same mag­a­zine empire, Conde Nast Pub­li­ca­tions.

In his arti­cle, Glad­well takes a lot of pot­shots at social media. It’s easy to do. He picks Clay Shirky, another New York “Big Idea” guy as his rhetor­i­cal straw­man now, claim­ing Shirky’s book “Here Comes Every­body” is the “bible of social-media move­ment.” Read­ing Glad­well, you kind of wish he’d get out of the echo box of circle-jerk New York Big Talk­ers (just get­ting out of the Conde Nast building’s cafe­te­ria would be a good start).

Gladwell’s cer­tainly right in that most of what passes for activism on Twit­ter and Face­book is ridicu­lous. Click­ing a “Like” but­ton or chang­ing your pro­file image green doesn’t do much. He makes an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between “weak ties” (Face­book “friends” who aren’t friends; Twit­ter cam­paigns that are risk-free) and “strong ties.” He cites the Civil Rights move­ment as a strong-tie phe­nom­e­non: the peo­ple who put them­selves on the line tended to be those with close friends also putting them­selves on the line.

What Glad­well misses is strong-tie orga­niz­ing going on in social media. A lot of what’s hap­pen­ing over on Quak­erQuaker is pretty strong-tie–it’s trans­lat­ing to work­shops, arti­cles, and is just one of a num­ber of impor­tant net­works that are form­ing. Peo­ple are find­ing each other and mak­ing real con­nec­tions that spill out into the real world. It’s not that online orga­nizes cre­ates real world changes, or even the reverse. Instead, under the right cir­cum­stances they can feed into each other, with each com­po­nent mag­ni­fy­ing the other’s reach.

One exam­ple of non-hierarchical involved social media is how Quaker blog­gers came together to explain Tom Fox’s motives after his kid­nap­ping. It didn’t have any effect on the kid­nap­pers, obvi­ously, but we did reach a lot of peo­ple who were curi­ous why a Friend might choose such a per­son­ally dan­ger­ous form of Chris­t­ian wit­ness. This was all done by inter-related groups of peo­ple with no bud­get and no orga­ni­za­tional chart. But these things don’t have to be quite so life-and-death.

A more recent exam­ple I’ve been able to see up close is the way my wife’s church has orga­nized against dioce­san attempts to shut it down: a core group of lead­ers have emerged; they share power, divide up roles and have been wag­ing an orga­nized cam­paign for about 2.5 years now. One ele­ment of this work has been the Savest​marys​.org blog. The website’s only impor­tant because it’s been part of a real-world social net­work but it’s had an influ­ence that’s gone far beyond the hand­ful of peo­ple who write for it. One of the more sur­pris­ing audi­ences have been the many staff at the Dioce­san head­quar­ters who visit every day–a small group has taken over quite a bit of men­tal space over there!

It’s been inter­est­ing for me to com­pare Quak­erQuaker with an ear­lier peace project of mine, Non​vi​o​lence​.org, which ran for thir­teen years start­ing in 1995. In many ways it was the big­ger site: a larger audi­ence, with a wider base of inter­est. It was a pop­u­lar site, with many vis­its and a fairly active bul­letin board for much of it’s life. But it didn’t spawn work­shop or con­fer­ences. There’s no “move­ment” asso­ci­ated with it. Dona­tions were min­i­mal and I never felt the sup­port struc­ture that I have now with my Quaker work.

Non​vi​o​lence​.org was a good idea, but it was a “weak tie” net­work. QuakerQuaker’s net­work is stronger for two rea­sons that I can iden­tify. The obvi­ous one is that it’s built atop the orga­niz­ing iden­tity of a social group (Friends). But it also speaks more directly to its par­tic­i­pants, ask­ing them to share their lives and offer­ing real-world oppor­tu­ni­ties for inter­ac­tion. So much of my blog­ging on Non​vi​o​lence​.org was Big Idea thoughts pieces about the sit­u­a­tion in Bosnia–that just doesn’t pro­vide the same kind of imme­di­ate per­sonal entre.

Mal­colm Glad­well min­i­mizes the lead­er­ship struc­ture of activist orga­ni­za­tions, where lead­er­ship and power is in con­stant flux. He like­wise min­i­mizes the lead­er­ship of social media net­works. Yes, any­one can pub­lish but we all have dif­fer­ent lev­els of vis­i­bil­ity and influ­ence and there is a fil­ter­ing effect. I have twenty-five years of orga­nized activism under my belt and fif­teen years of online orga­niz­ing and while the tech­nol­ogy is very dif­fer­ent, a lot of the social dynam­ics are remark­ably similar.

Glad­well is an hired employee in one of the largest media com­pa­nies in the world. It’s a very struc­tured life: he’s got edi­tors, pub­lish­ers, copy­ed­i­tors, proof­read­ers. He’s a cog in a com­pany with $5 bil­lion in annual rev­enue. It’s not really sur­pris­ing that he doesn’t have much direct expe­ri­ence with effec­tive social net­works. It’s hard to see how social media is com­ple­ment­ing real world grass­roots net­works from the 40th floor of a mid-town Man­hat­tan skyscraper.

Related Read­ing:

• What Mal­colm Glad­well Doesn’t Under­stand About Activism and Social Net­works over on Stu​den​tAc​tivism​.net, via @public_historian.
• Friends and Hier­ar­chy and Social Change. Jeanne Burns on QuakerQuaker.
• Make the Rev­o­lu­tion from Anil Dash: “Peo­ple who want to see marches in the streets are often unwill­ing to admit that those marches just don’t pro­duce much in the way of results in Amer­ica in 2010.”
• Social Media for Good and Evil, Strong and Weak Ties, Online/Offline,and Orgs and Net­works from Beth Kantor

Warn­ing: this is a blog post about blogging.