One of my favorite thinkers/speakers/seekers (not diluted in any way by the fact that this is a long list ;)), Douglas Rushkoff, has a piece today critiquing SMS activism — or rather, examining both its power and its pathos. The power is in the immediacy, and the ease with which someone can receive an alert and take an action — combined with the scale effect of thousands of those someones acting in concert at a critical moment. But the flip side of that ease is the lack of long-term commitment or participation required, which is both what makes smart mob activism attractive to busy mobile individuals as well as what perhaps dooms it to having a lesser impact than lasting coalitions of grassroots constituents contributing long-term effort to activist goals.

Or does it? Do they need to be mutually exclusive? Is it possible to take advantage of the more temporary, ad hoc political contributions that "the masses" are increasingly able to give via mobile technologies without sacrificing any of the more in-depth coalition building that is still going on in our local communities? I truly hope so. The reality is there are more memes, activities and obligations competing for our attention now than ever, and short attention span activism may be all some folks feel willing to give. Signing a few petitions per year may indeed be accused of looking "reductive and passive," and may also be indicative of a culture so frequently willing to take orders from above. But that is a symptom of the paradigm we're in, and those few signatures are still a small part of shifting the paradigm to perhaps a less harried place where those same individuals may just be inspired to take a more active role in the future.