Today marks the 30th anniversary of the “Baltic Way” in which almost a quarter of the combined populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania formed an unbroken human chain of linked arms almost 400 miles long to protest Soviet occupation. Coordinating almost two million ordinary citizens spanning three countries to form a chain spanning the same distance as Washington, DC to Boston required extraordinary coordination, yet was accomplished in an era long before social media and where cellphones were largely nonexistent. The ability of traditional organizing and especially radio to mobilize the populations of three countries reminds us that many of the powers we ascribe to social media today long predate the digital revolution.
Several years ago, I attended a panel of preeminent scholars from the nation’s most prestigious institutions who proceeded to lecture how before the era of social media there were no social movements, no social organizations, no ways for the public to mobilize at scale. In their telling, social media represented the first time in the history of human existence that ordinary like-minded citizens had been able to band together to exchange ideas or effect social change. Thankfully, an audience member rose at the end to offer the panel a history lesson on the role of civic groups, churches, phone trees, newsletters and civic organizing in America during the era of Martin Luther King Jr. and explained to the panelists the long history of civil organizing in the pre-digital era.
Like a growing number of scholars, the ones on that stage hailed from disciplines focused on today’s digitally-mediated organizing efforts and where technology itself has become the centerpiece. In this retelling of the history of civic organizing, digitally mediated organizing is fundamentally different from traditional organizing and the long history of community-based activism is written out of history.
In an era of smartphones and social media, the role of social and professional societies like civic groups, churches, schools, neighborhood organizations, fraternities, social clubs and professional societies is gradually being forgotten as social platforms emphasize the global over the local.
Yet it was these vast social and professional networks that acted as last century’s social media, assisted by the technologies of the era, from newsletters to the telephone.
The organization of the Baltic Way three decades ago reminds us that we don’t need smartphones or social media, real-time messaging apps or GPS-powered maps to organize intricately coordinated civic protests.
In the case of the Baltic Way, the Estonian Rahvarinne, the Latvian Popular Front and the Lithuanian Sajudis came together to organize the citizens of their respective countries, using traditional organizing methods to coordinate the mass movement of as many as two million people with the precision of a ballet dance.
Even by today’s standards, with smartphones, social media, 4G mobile internet and GPS, coordinating the movements of that many people across that large of a distance while ensuring there was not a single gap in the chain would be a monumental undertaking.
How then did organizers accomplish such a task in the pre-digital era?
The community-based networks of the Rahvarinne, Latvian Popular Front and Lithuanian Sajudis helped organize the mass population mobilization down to the level of each individual city, town and village. Yet it was radio that played a critical role in facilitating the precision positioning of the populations of three countries.
Radio has long played a critical role in social movements, especially in the pre-digital era. In its own 30th anniversary, the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) recounted the incredible importance of radio in organizing and conducting social protest.
In the case of the Baltic Way, traditional communications radio including walkie-talkies were used by organizers to coordinate. A critical piece of this coordination was the use of broadcast radio. Participants heading to the protest were asked to bring radios with them tuned to the national broadcasters. Coordinators were in constant communication with the broadcasters and used this real-time mass communication channel to help direct participants to the right places, to avoid too many people in one place and not enough people in another and to coordinate the precise moment when the chain should link arms.
Today Twitter would typically be used for such real-time organizing, with official accounts and hashtags used to communicate with residents in each area and potentially even an interactive map with pushpins showing where participants were still needed and how many at each location, with users able to sign up for each position as they headed in that direction and GPS tracking how long until they arrived.
The ability of such a massive-scale yet also massive-precision event to be accomplished in the pre-digital era reminds us that so many of the powers we ascribe to social media and smartphones today are merely digital reincarnations of traditional organizing approaches that have been around since the dawn of time.
It is not that social media and smartphones and have enabled large-scale organizing for the first time. They have merely made it easier and reduced the cost of such coordination, placing it in the hands of more organizations and lowering the barrier to entry. At the same time, it has also made it more vulnerable to intervention, with governments able to simple sever internet access to halt today’s digitally-mediated organizing in its tracks. Indeed, the standard government response today to mass protests is to suspend internet access, cutting off the ability of organizers to coordinate.
Perhaps the most important lesson of all is that social media sought to put global before local. It depreciated the concept of community in favor of globalization in which a stranger halfway across the world was just as trusted as a best friend and next-door neighbor. It is no coincidence that confronted with a deluge of falsehoods, fraud and foreign influence, social platforms are reestablishing community, reshaping their communicative metaphors to return to the concept of interconnected communities rather than the all-to-all community-less individual-centric networks they once favored.
In the end, we are reminded of all of the amazing things we were able to accomplish without social media.
