Note 1. Social Media Activism. IT BLOG. Gladwell on Social Media and Activism - Alexis C. Madrigal. I really like Malcolm Gladwell's new piece on digital political organizing. It's got an excellent structure, alternating scenes of the lunch counter protests of the 1960s with ideas about the loose social groups that activists attempt to catalyze on Facebook and Twitter. His big point is weak-tie networks don't have the dedication and structure to take on an established power structure.
Martin Luther King, Jr, he notes, had a one million dollar budget and 100 staff members on the ground when he got to Birmingham. I found myself surprised at how much I liked the piece. Certainly, the strong form of his argument -- that Twitter and Facebook make it harder to organize -- seems unsupported (at least in this article). So, I think we can read Gladwell's piece as a fairly specific indictment of the current uses of the current generation of tools. But there are two threads of his story, in particular, that leave a lot to be desired. First, a smaller quibble.
This feels thin. Twitter, Facebook, and social activism. 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. 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. These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. What makes people capable of this kind of activism? Social media. Social-network. Community activism. SocialMediaRevolution1. Tweets and the Streets | Social Media and Contemporary Activism.
Why Social Media Is Reinventing Activism. The argument that social media fosters feel-good clicking rather than actual change began long before Malcolm Gladwell brought it up in the New Yorker — long enough to generate its own derogatory term. “Slacktivism,” as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” If you only measure donations, social media is no champion. The national chapter of the Red Cross, for instance, has 208,500 “likes” on Facebook, more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, and a thriving blog. But according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, online donations accounted for just 3.6% of private donations made to the organization in 2009. But social good is a movement still in its infancy. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. All of that virtual liking, following, joining, signing, forwarding, and, yes, clicking, has a lot of potential to grow into big change.