Weak Ties And revolutions (With A Little ‘R’)
27 September 2010:
Malcolm Gladwell wants to pop the bubble surround social media’s supposed role in capital ‘R’ Revolutions, as in the #iranelections.
I think the real story is in lower case ‘r’ revolutions, but here’s his core thesis:
Malcolm Gladwell, Twitter, Facebook, and social activism
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”
These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
Luckily, Gladwell is here to help us remember what activism is (wink). He lays some solid research into the top-down command-and-control of the Montgomery bus boycott, and contrasts that with the weak ties inherent in online social networks, and concludes — perhaps a bit too hastily — that social tools can’t possibly be instrumental in revolutions like the civil rights movement, which was based on a top-down organization:
The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.
Well, they haven’t in the past, perhaps in part because these tools have only existed for a few years. Certainly, Martin Luther King and the civil rights leaders didn’t have them as an option.
His other anecdotes — pulled from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody — are not serious counter examples: they are tales about people looking for their lost cell phones, or trying to get bone marrow donors: not anything revolutionary.
Ultimately his piece relies on the reader: if you buy his argument, he’s made his case. But I believe that we will have to wait for deeper research into the shape and arc of today’s revolutions, which increasingly are likely to be diffused, like networks, and relying on weak ties.
Consider the use of cell phone minutes as a currency in Kenya as a means of getting around high banking charges. This is a revolution for the poor people there, and is linked to social networks connected by cell phones. This became critically important when the country was wracked by violence in 2008, and it became dangerous to carry money and nearly impossible to send it to relatives.
And an example of a little r revolution, more close to home: the Tea Partiers. Yes, I know there are some fat cats bank rolling some aspects of the Tea Party, but mostly it looks like a grass roots revolution that is remaking (or unmaking?) the GOP. Leaving aside their agenda, its evident that weak tie networks, supported by social tools online, are at the core of that movement’s startling rise to prominence, without a central command-and-control structure. In fact, it looks a lot like his characterization of the Palestine Liberation Organization:
The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”
Given my personal political views, I hope that the Tea Party movement suffers the problems of starting out as a network, but looked at dispassionately, their internal lack of a top-down control structure hasn’t stopped their impact on the American political system.
I think Gladwell needs to look at the little r revolutions going on all around us, like the urban food movement, Grameen-style microloan systems, and others. This is where social tools will change the world, one weak tie at a time.
Update 2 October 2010
It looks like people finally had their copies of the New Yorker delivered, like David Weinberger who agrees with my use of the Tea Party as an example of recent small ‘r’ revolutionary activities via social tools:
David Weinberger, Gladwell discovers it takes more than 140 characters to overturn a government
Gladwell is right, in my view, to debunk the over-enthusiastic belief that the Net would sweep away all traditional institutions that stand in the way of the great populist uprising.
He is also right to debunk the notion that the Net would replace all traditional forms of governance and organization.
At this point, however, those are strawpeople. Find me someone who believes that these days.
The more plausible belief is that for the most entrenched of institutions, the Net has an effect by changing the ecology around them. So, citizen journalism has not obviated the need for professional journalism and traditional news media. Rather, a new symbiotic ecology (hmm, mixing metaphors) has arisen. Likewise, amateur scientists have not replaced professional scientists and their institutions, but the new ecology allows for the interaction of everyone with an interest, and this is changing how science is done, how it is evaluated, and how it has an effect. Likewise, the Dean campaign — and every national campaign after it — understood that it was not enough to have a social network, but that that network must be moved to take action out in the real streets of America.
Likewise, I venture that few believe that Facebook or Twitter on their own is going to bring about revolutionary political change. But that doesn’t mean that political change is unaffected by them. As the Tea Party looks like it’s rolling to victory in 2010, try to imagine that it could exist much less succeed without social media. It also needed money from Big Interests, the attention of mainstream media, and non-Net communication channels. But, who is arguing otherwise? The ecology has changed.
And also Leo Mirani of the Guardian, who uses the Kashmir crisis as a counterexample to Gladwell’s dismissals:
in claiming that all social networks are good for is “helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teenage girls”, Gladwell ignores the true significance of social media, which lies in their ability to rapidly spread information about alternative points of view that might otherwise never reach a large audience. Gladwell quotes Golnaz Esfandiari in Foreign Policy as asking why “no one seemed to wonder why people trying to co-ordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi”. The answer, as supplied by a friend from Tehran in June last year, is simple: “We need to be seen and heard by the world, we need all the support we can get. If the governments [of the west] refuse to accept the new government, it’s gonna be meaningful for the movement, somehow.”
A more recent example is Kashmir, where this summer’s protests gained widespread media coverage both in India and internationally. But Kashmir has been protesting for 20 years, with some of the biggest demonstrations occurring in 2008. What changed this year is that urban, middle-class India, traditionally uninterested in news from Kashmir except when we’re at war with Pakistan, was for the first time able to see and hear the other side of the story. Facebook users in India rose from 0.7 million in summer 2008, to 3 million in 2009, to 13 million today.
On Twitter, it is possible to follow journalists tweeting live from Srinagar. On Facebook, it is hard to avoid mentions of Kashmir or links to articles on websites you wouldn’t otherwise have heard of. YouTube is littered with videos of protests in Kashmir. And when clips of human rights violations are taken down, Facebook is where you find new links.
The mainstream press in India, like its middle-class readers, is nationalistic and unquestioning on the subject of Kashmir. Allegations of human rights abuses are rarely reported, let alone investigated. But this year, even the Times of India, purveyor of “sunshine news”, published a report claiming that for the first time, more civilians in Kashmir had been killed by the Indian state than by militants.
“We seem to have forgotten what activism is,” writes Gladwell. If activism is defined only as taking direct action and protesting on the streets, he might be right. But if activism extends to changing the minds of people, to making populations aware of what their governments are doing in their name, to influencing opinion across the world, then the revolution will be indeed be tweeted.
- Make The Revolution (anildash.com)
- Will the Science of Networks put paid to all the Snake Oil? (broadstuff.com)
- The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
- Gladwell Misses the Vesica Piscis (theimaginationage.net)
- Your (Brilliant) Responses to Gladwell on Social Media and Activism (atlantic.com)
- Will social networks boost good political change? (www.marginalrevolution.com)
- David Helfenbein: How Malcolm Gladwell Misses the Mark in His Recent New Yorker Piece on Social Revolution (huffingtonpost.com)
- Best in Blogs: Tech Brands Are Religions, Twitter Is No Revolution … (eone87.co.cc)
update 2 October 2010
- Alan Rosenblatt: Which Revolution Will Be Twittered? (huffingtonpost.com)
- David Helfenbein: How Malcolm Gladwell Misses the Mark in His Recent New Yorker Piece on Social Revolution (huffingtonpost.com)
- Best in Blogs: Tech Brands Are Religions, Twitter Is No Revolution … (eone87.co.cc)
Source: newyorker.com
