Small Change. At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end.
The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. Answer to "Small Change" For a man who has devoted a significant part of his life to documenting "how little things can make a big difference", Malcolm Gladwell is surprisingly dismissive of the power of social networking to effect change. In the latest issue of the New Yorker, he writes that the role played by Facebook and Twitter in recent protests and revolutions has been greatly exaggerated.
Gladwell's argument is that social networks encourage a lazy activism that will only extend as far as "liking" a cause but not actually doing anything about it. This is because social networks are built around weak ties, where real activism needs strong bonds. Citing the American example, he points out that "events in the early 1960s became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade – and it happened without email, texting, Facebook, or Twitter. " Gladwell is right to be sceptical of social media's rah-rah brigade. On Twitter, it is possible to follow journalists tweeting live from Srinagar. Biz Stone's Answer. The New Yorker recently published a thoughtfully written article by Malcolm Gladwell titled, "Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.
" Citing research done by Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam, Mr. Gladwell compares what he sees happening today among people connected by modern social media to the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Real social change, Gladwell argues, is a phenomenon driven by something described as "strong ties" in the field of mathematical sociology.
People who lived through this time repeatedly referred to feeling a "fever" to participate. On Christmas Day 2009, Liu Xiaobo, a fifty-four year old Chinese writer, was sentenced to eleven years imprisonment for co-authoring a manifesto of human rights calling for political reform in the People's Republic of China. Following the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen square and ensuing riots in Xinjiang that summer, Twitter is blocked in China. Twitter Founders: Gladwell Got It Wrong. “Laughable,” “absurd,” “ludicrous” and “pointless” were words Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone used Monday night to describe a recent Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about the futility of social media to create real social change. Of course, you wouldn’t expect those two to agree with Gladwell’s thesis, but they offered valid critiques while speaking at an event for the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
Stone said he could see validity in Gladwell’s point that effecting meaningful and sustained social change requires strong relationships and hierarchical structure. But he added, The real-time exchange of information — a service like Twitter — it would be absurd to think it’s not complementary to activism. When it really comes down to it, it’s not going to be technology that’s going to be the agent of change. Williams, for his part, said of the Gladwell article, “It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable.
Image courtesy Flickr user evhead. My thoughts Part 1. Malcom Gladwell’s article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted,” was forwarded to me by at least half-a-dozen colleagues after it was published just three days ago. I have purposefully not read other people’s responses to this piece so that I could write down my own observations before being swayed by those of others. So what do I think? Finally, someone else is calling attention to the importance of civil resistance (strategic nonviolent action) in the context of new digital technologies! This intersection is what I’m most excited about when it comes to the new tools of social media. Gladwell uses the example of the civil rights movement, which in his own words was an example of “high-risk activism” and “also crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline.”
Indeed, “the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion.” Like this: Like Loading... My thoughts Part 2. The first part of my response to Gladwell’s article in The New Yorker explained why principles, strategies and tactics of civil resistance are important for the future of digital activism. In this second part, I address Gladwell’s arguments on high vs. low risk activism, weak vs. strong ties and hierarchies vs networks. According to Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam, the civil rights movement represented “high-risk activism” which requires “strong-ties”. By strong-ties, McAdam refers to the bonds of friendship, family, relationships, etc. These social ties appear to be a necessary condition for recruiting and catalyzing a movement engaged in high-risk activism. “What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement.”
Indeed, you’re more likely to join a rally if your close friends are going. In contrast, Gladwell argues that “the platforms of social media are built around weak ties.” Ushahidi is only 10% of the solution Like this: Like Loading... Does Egypt Need Twitter? When Mao famously said that power springs from the barrel of a gun, it was assumed that he was talking about guns. There wasn’t much interest at the time in how he chose to communicate that sentiment: whether he said it in a speech, say, or whispered it to a friend, or wrote it in his diary or published it in a book. That would never happen today, of course. We now believe that the “how” of a communicative act is of huge importance. We would say that Mao posted that power comes from the barrel of a gun on his Facebook page, or we would say that he blogged about gun barrels on Tumblr—and eventually, as the apostles of new media wrestled with the implications of his comments, the verb would come to completely overcome the noun, the part about the gun would be forgotten, and the the big takeaway would be: Whoa.
Did you see what Mao just tweeted? Right now there are protests in Egypt that look like they might bring down the government. Illustration: Seymour Chwast. Ignorant arguments. Social Media? Not a Big Deal. Malcolm Gladwell: Social Media Still Not a Big Deal. Author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell caused some controversy last year when he said social-media tools like Twitter aren’t worth much as a tool for social activism (or at least not “real” social activism). After the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — both of which involved extensive use of Twitter and Facebook by demonstrators — many wondered whether Gladwell would alter this stance based on some powerful evidence to the contrary. The author made it clear in a recent interview with CNN, however, that he still doesn’t think such tools amount to much. In the interview (there’s a full transcript here), Gladwell says Twitter and Facebook may have been used by demonstrators to communicate during the recent uprisings in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, but it isn’t clear they were crucial in any way to the revolutions there.
I mean, in cases where there are no tools of communication, people still get together. #GladwellLogic. #GladwellLogic Corollary. The Political Power of Social Media. On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision was announced, thousands of Filipinos, angry that their corrupt president might be let off the hook, converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila. The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading, "Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk. " The crowd quickly swelled, and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking traffic in downtown Manila. The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response -- close to seven million text messages were sent that week -- so alarmed the country's legislators that they reversed course and allowed the evidence to be presented.
Estrada's fate was sealed; by January 20, he was gone. The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader. Register. The Political Power of Social Media. Clay Shirky just published a piece in Foreign Affairs on “The Political Power of Social Media.” I’m almost done with writing my literature review of digital activism in repressive states for my dissertation so this is a timely write-up by Clay who also sits on my dissertation committee.
The points he makes echo a number of my blog posts and thus provides further support to some of the arguments articulated in my dissertation. I’ll use this space to provide excerpts and commentary on his 5,000+ word piece to include in my literature review. “Less than two hours after the [Philippine Congress voted not to impeach President Joseph Estrada], thousands of Filipinos [...] converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila.
The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading, ‘Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk.’ See this blog post on Political Change in the Digital Age: The Prospect of Smart Mobs in Authoritarian States. Like this: Like Loading... It’s Not Twitter or Facebook, It’s the Power of the Network. Just as it was during the recent uprisings in Tunisia, the role of social media in the recent upheaval in Egypt has been the subject of much debate since the unrest began on Thursday. Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Friday poked fun at the idea that Twitter might have played a key part in the demonstrations, and there are many observers who share his skepticism. The real trigger for the uprisings, they argue, is simply the frustration of the oppressed Egyptian people — which is undoubtedly true. But it also seems clear that social media has played a key role in getting the word out, and in helping organizers plan their protests.
In the end, it’s not about Twitter or Facebook: it’s about the power of real-time networked communication. But is anyone really arguing that Twitter and Facebook caused the revolutions in Tunisia or Egypt, or even the earlier public uprisings in Moldova or Iran for that matter? Did Twitter or Facebook cause the Tunisian revolt? Social media helps activism, and here’s how.