Can Twitter change the world?

If you’re involved with creating change, the emerging trends around this and thinking about what the future might hold, it's likely that social media is on your radar. As soon as you engage in the concept of social media you run into strong, contradictory opinions. On the one hand, Twitter is a huge agent of social change; it’s leading to revolutions, it’s the future of all human interactions (hyperbole not mine). On the other, put succinctly in the words of one of my friends, “Twitter is stupid”.

As an organisation that advises on sustainability and the future, we can’t predict where the fate of Twitter lies or how this trend will exactly evolve. But we do need to think through some of these claims and how they could impact sustainable development.

So it’s worth looking at each position in a bit more detail. Clay Shirky is one of the foremost proponents of the first point of view; in his book “Here Comes Everybody” he discusses the power of networks to create change. What social media facilitates is huge networks and, thus, huge problem solving ability. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds then it’s undeniable that what Twitter, Facebook et al give you is access to a very large crowd. They also facilitate incredibly quick communication and this is what’s led to the idea of a ‘Twitter revolution’, with people pointing to the use of Twitter in Moldova, Iran, and now Egypt and Tunisia for spreading social unrest.

Malcolm Gladwell's article “Why the revolution will not be tweeted” articulates the opposing view very well. He argues that what Twitter and Facebook give you is a lot of weak ties: think, for example, of the number of Facebook friends who you never see in real life. Genuine activism, he argues, needs passion and figureheads and that is best generated through strong contacts and ties, which social media can’t provide.

This is also the sense behind the derogatory term ‘slactivism’ (more kindly called ‘armchair activism’), engaging in activism from the comfort of your computer screen. As Gladwell notes, the Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition had more than 1.2 million members, but if you average out their financial donations it comes to about 9 cents apiece.

But then, back to the view of social media being a huge agent of change, the UK government’s u-turn on forests can be largely credited to a very active online petition campaign. More than half a million signatures were collected in a matter of weeks - think how long that would have taken to mobilise if it had been people standing outside stations with clipboards.

So we need to remember that these are tools, and it’s how they’re used that counts. I don’t think Twitter in itself can really be called ‘stupid’; after all, you wouldn’t really call a hammer ‘stupid’, but using it might be if the job calls for a screwdriver.

So what does all this have to do with sustainability? There are lots of implications and I’m sure you can add more - via comments optionbelow, or maybe even on Twitter (@hl_clarkson; @forum4thefuture)

One that strikes me is that the power and speed of these communication tools are important for organisations both in transmitting and receiving messages about their work. Look at the speed with which the Twitter campaign against BP gathered force during the oil spill in 2010.The outrage at BP would have happened through traditional media sources, it just would have been slower and lacked some of the power and creativity (the speed with which people came up with new logos for BP added an extra dimension to the online debate).

This adds additional pressure for companies to get their sustainability story straight. They might not enjoy that pressure, but it’s increasingly going to become a reality, as the likes of Nestlé are finding as they come under pressure from the social networking power of Greenpeace. Conversely, when companies have a positive story to tell they can also transmit that very quickly and strongly through the same channels.

Another implication is that, as with a lot of sustainability issues, there are huge opportunities out there to be exploited. At the moment these are largely being found by social entrepreneurs, who are trying different approaches and using the power of social media to harness distributed time and energy. I love the idea of sparked.com, for example: “micro-volunteering”, connecting people with small amounts of time to charities with small amounts of resources, allowing online participation for social good.

And some large companies are getting in on this act, the Pepsi Refresh campaign used crowdsourcing and GE’s Ecomagination Challenge is a $200 million experiment in using crowdsourcing to find the best way to build the next-generation power grid.

Neither of these is particularly revolutionary, but it’s early days. The green movement and sustainability have always had participatory democracy at their heart, reflecting the importance of values in long-term decision-making. And that Twitter can do very well. Political revolutions may not be tweeted, but the sustainability one might just well be.