Ray Brescia

On his book The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions

Cover Interview of February 10, 2021

The wide angle

The book builds on the work of scholars who have noted that social movements changed their shape and focus in the 1970s to become more top-down and professionalized. In the book, I point out that one of the reasons for this shift is that the means of communication changed dramatically.

Grassroots groups used to have to organize into what has been called a “trans-local” structure—local chapters or nodes connected to a larger, national structure. Many groups in the 1970s began to organize in more of a top-down manner and were no longer built into local chapters. I argue in the book that one of the reasons for this was that a new technology came on the scene around this time—the ability to create computerized mailing lists—and this allowed a more centralized, professionalized structure. Groups abandoned the trans-local, grassroots approach that mobilized around face-to-face encounters.

I argue further that, with social media, it is certainly possible to continue this model of organizing but I highlight a number of contemporary case studies where advocates are utilizing social media and other tools to recreate the grassroots, face-to-face organizing of prior eras. They are also rebuilding social capital and trust, two essential ingredients (and by-products) of grassroots, face-to-face organizing that were more common in grassroots movements of prior eras, before the advent of the computerized mailing list.

technology / social movements / media / communication / network / civil rights movement / social change /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009