Soulmates?

I recently joined the social bookmarking resource Diigo yesterday to connect with other people out there talking and reading about Slacktivism. After some diligent searching, I realized it’s hard to find someone who has a lot to say about it on a regular basis. Eventually though, I came across Dan McQuillan. Other than his name, you won’t find any of the other usual personal information about him – no profile picture, no occupation, no short bio. Dan’s Diigo does tell me one thing though: he reads… A LOT. A member since April of last year, Dan has already amassed over 18,500 public bookmarks. If I do my math right, that’s about… well, more than I want to read in a day. Just tonight as I’m writing this, he has tagged more than ten separate articles, all within an hour of each other.

I was also drawn to McQuillan because of his bookmarking topics, many of which are closely related to Slacktivism. While he seems to be more of the active type than the slacktive type, his tags did point me towards some relevant articles that I will pick on later. “Social”, “Media”, “Activism”, and “Research” are his most common tags, in addition to “Twitter” leading the pack with 819 uses. Recently, he has been reading and tagging articles on the topic of Internet censorship, and the new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Following the recent concern of the SOPA and PIPA acts, ACTA seems to pose an even greater threat to Internet freedom, as it would allow websites to more easily track and report user activity. Right now, it is working its way through the EU Parliament, where a vote of “NO” will effectively dismantle the agreement. McQuillan also bookmarked several YouTube videos on this subject, highlighting another cool capability of Diigo that I was unaware of.

One particularly applicable gem I found after digging through a few more pages of McQuillan’s readings is The Meta-Activism Project. This “non-traditional digital activism think tank” aims to provide essential readings, thought-provoking blogs, and quantitative data on digital activism to its readers. Unfortunately, much of their work supports the exact opposite of my opinion on the relationship between social media and involvement. In Dan’s tagged article, “The Proof is in the Pendulum: a History of Digital Activism and Repression”, author Mary Joyce uses a data set to graphically show how the emergence of social media has exponentially increased digital activism over the past six years. Ok, fine… the numbers don’t lie. The world is becoming more involved digitally, as campaigns are made more accessible through these tools. But this does not equate to literal, physical, successful activism, as evidenced by this graphic from the very same website:

Another McQuillan-tagged article that shared my same contempt of digital activism malpractice is Micah White’s, “A Vision of Post-Clicktivist Activism” found on Adbusters. I breathed a long sigh of relief upon reading this post… Finally, someone else who agrees with me!:

“If #OCCUPYWALLSTREET fails, it will be because we've blindly adopted "best practices" put forth by wealthy Californian techies turned reformist campaigners. Their methods now dominate the way many organizers believe activism should be done, privileging a data-obsessed, metrics-oriented, technocratic approach which is closer to advertising than resistance.”

Now, if I could only get Dan McQuillan’s stance on all of this, I might be able to call him my “Social Bookmarking Soulmate”. Alas, he does not add comments along with his tags, so I will never know. Either way, his diligent tagging techniques of related topics and interest in all things related to social media and digital activism make Dan McQuillan a valuable resource to any reader of mine.