Ray Brescia
The Future of Change
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.
Editor: Judi Pajo
The Future of Change
Ray Brescia The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions Cornell University Press 240 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 1501748110
Available here →February 10, 2021
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Ray Brescia
Ray Brescia is the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Chair in Law & Technology and a Professor of Law at Albany Law School. He is a former community organizer and lawyer who served communities of color in New York City before joining the faculty at Albany Law in 2007. In addition to authoring The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions, which is featured in his Rorotoko interview, he is the co-editor, with John Travis Marshall, of How Cities Will Save the World: Urban Innovation in the Face of Population Flows, Climate Change, and Economic Inequality (Routledge, 2016), as well as the co-editor, with Eric K. Stern, of the forthcoming work Crisis Lawyering: Effective Legal Advocacy in Emergency Situations (NYU Press, 2021). Much of his scholarly writing can be found on his SSRN page . He is a graduate of Yale Law School and Fordham University.
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The 1970s shift from chapter organizing to centralized professional advocacy was driven substantially by one technology, the computerized mailing list.
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