Apparently, America's truck drivers are going on strike. Or maybe they aren’t.
As is the case with most social media postings the truth of the possible upcoming strike is very unclear.
If you've spent any amount of time on social media over the past couple of weeks you may have seen something about truck drivers supposedly parking their rigs on Oct. 1 as a protest against high diesel prices.
The posts have been shared, reshared, stitched, reposted, and discussed enough times that regardless of whether a strike actually materializes, it has become a pretty good example of one of the strangest problems created by social media. Having so many ways to organize has somehow made it extremely difficult to get everyone organized around the same thing.
The trucker strike rumor is a perfect example. A social media post can reach hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of hours. One video can make a claim, another person can repeat it, someone else can turn it into a graphic and suddenly there are thousands of people talking about an event that may not actually have an organization, central source, or confirmed plan behind it.
In this particular case, reporting published in mid-September found no evidence of a nationwide trucker strike being formally organized for Oct. 1. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) which represents more than 150,000 drivers, said they had not had any plans for a strike and that the supposed strike appeared to be nothing more than social-media chatter.
And yet the rumor spread. This particular rumor caught my attention for another reason, though.
I happen to have a relative who has been a truck driver for more than a decade. So, naturally, I asked the person who actually sits behind the wheel for a living whether they had heard anything about it. The answer was no.
Not only had they not heard about any such strike but it wasn't something being discussed among the people they regularly work with either. In fact, they went so far to say that truck drivers will likely “never” strike.
One truck driver certainly isn't representative of an entire industry. And I stand firmly in the never say never mindset. Their opinion doesn't prove a strike couldn't happen nor does it mean that there shouldn’t be one (gas and diesel prices are ridiculous after all). But it did make me stop and think about how strange social media has made our perception of scale.
Here was a person who has spent more than 10 years in an industry, supposedly preparing for a nationwide work stoppage, and the first they were hearing about it was from me asking about something someone else told me, that they, had seen on a random social media platform. Something the internet made to them look like everyone was talking about it. That's the part that interests me more than the rumor itself.
Because this is what happens when everyone has a megaphone.
Think about the math (a statement I do not say often or lightly). There are roughly 3.6 million professional truck drivers in the United States. Now imagine a post about a proposed trucker strike getting 200,000 views. Two hundred thousand people sounds enormous. However, of that 200,000 people seeing something only a fraction of them believe they’re going to be impacted by it.
(Disclaimer: I truly believe a nationwide truck driver strike would impact literally everyone). We now return to our regularly scheduled ranting.
Of that 200,000 people only a fraction are truck drivers. Only a fraction agree with the cause. Only a fraction can afford to stop working. Only a fraction would participate and only if they knew someone who already was. A different fraction would share the post and consider their part done. And the smallest of those fractions would genuinely park their trucks and put their livelihoods on the line to participate.
That's the difference between visibility and participation.
Even if every one of those 200,000 people who saw the post were professional truck drivers that would still represent only about five percent of the nation's nearly four-million professional truck drivers. Five percent may be able to make some noise. Five percent may make people nervous. But five percent probably isn't enough to create the kind of unified action people imagine when they see a post promising that an entire industry is about to shut down.
And that's the problem with trying to organize anything significant through social media. Social media has made it incredibly easy to mistake people seeing a message for people willing to stand behind the cause. A post gets 200,000 views and suddenly it feels like 200,000 people are ready to act at the drop of a dime. They aren’t, not most of them at least, even if they do agree with it.
That distinction matters whether we're talking about truck drivers, a protest, a boycott, a local petition, or a community meeting.
And therein lies the problem. With social media readily available everyone is handed a megaphone. And when everyone has a megaphone, nobody does. You’re just surrounded by noise that you actively tune out so you can manage to live your everyday life.
While one person is organizing a protest, someone else is organizing a different protest. One group says Saturday. Another says Sunday. One says downtown. Another says City Hall. Someone creates an event page. Someone else says that page isn't legitimate. A third person shares an old graphic that has the wrong date. By the time everyone has finished organizing, half the potential participants don't know which version they're supposed to follow.
We've created a communication system capable of reaching millions of people instantly, but we've somehow made the simple act of getting the same information to the same people at the same time surprisingly difficult.
Maybe that's why the old-fashioned parts of organizing still matter. Phone calls. Meetings. People who know one another. A central source of information. A confirmed time and place. I daresay, a newspaper announcement, can go so much further. Someone who is actually responsible for answering the question, 'Is this really happening?”
Social media is exceptionally good at starting a conversation. It is exceptionally good at making something feel big. It is exceptionally good at giving ordinary people a platform. But a platform isn't enough. A viral post isn't a movement. And 200,000 views aren't 200,000 people willing to stand in the same place, at the same time, and accept the consequences of doing so.
Maybe that's the lesson. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, the hardest part isn't getting people to hear you it’s making them willing to follow you.