A Social Media Revolution

Perspectives and Insights around the social impacts of the new interactive media

November 2010
Annals of Innovation

Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell October 4, 2010

Social media can‘t provide what social change has always required.

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. ―You‘re acting
stupid, ignorant!‖ she said. They didn‘t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked.
The four still didn‘t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a
photographer from the Greensboro Record. ―I‘ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,‖ one of the
students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same
dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their
schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro‘s ―Negro‖
secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the
protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the
University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the
street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T.
football team arrived. ―Here comes the wrecking crew,‖ one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty
miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith
College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine‘s College and Shaw
University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and
Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month,
there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. ―I asked every student I met what the first day
of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,‖ the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. ―The
answer was always the same: ‗It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.‘ ‖ Some seventy thousand students
eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the
early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened
without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

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.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met
with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. ―I suppose if anyone
had come up behind me and yelled ‗Boo,‘ I think I would have fallen off my seat,‖ one of them said later. On
the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On
the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the
protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as ―burr-head nigger.‖ A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an
appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be
evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel
campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited
hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and
raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. ―No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an
automobile and certainly not at night,‖ they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three
volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and,
during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were
bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter
of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted
problems—is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the
Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn‘t,
as might be expected, ideological fervor. ―All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge
as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,‖ he concluded.
What mattered more was an applicant‘s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the
volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their
activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to
Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a ―strong-tie‖ phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the
nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the
organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary
actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall,
are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred
groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time,
only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside
St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary
determinant of who showed up was ―critical friends‖—the more friends you had who were critical of the
regime the more likely you were to join the protest.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin
McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate
of Blair‘s in A. & T.‘s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair,
Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm
and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil‘s room. They would all have remembered the murder of
Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957.
It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth‘s. They‘d discussed it for nearly a month.
Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and
McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, ―Are you
guys chicken or not?‖ Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he
was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.

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.
In a new book called ―The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to
Drive Social Change,‖ the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor
Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with
acute myelogenous leukemia. It‘s a perfect illustration of social media‘s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-
marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a
donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia‘s
business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia‘s plight to more than four hundred of their
acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos
were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were
registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That‘s the only
way you can get someone you don‘t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of
people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab
and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few
hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn‘t a trivial matter. But it doesn‘t involve financial or personal
risk; it doesn‘t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn‘t require that
you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it‘s the kind of commitment that will bring
only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don‘t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend
is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the
same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. ―Social networks are particularly
effective at increasing motivation,‖ Aaker and Smith write. But that‘s not true. Social networks are effective
at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook
page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents
apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of
thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A
spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, ―We wouldn‘t necessarily gauge someone‘s
value to the advocacy movement based on what they‘ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this
critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It‘s not something you can
measure by looking at a ledger.‖ In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to
make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated
enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a
―fever.‖ But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late
nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were
formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for
activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for
would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the
N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had
been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in
activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread
indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting ―movement centers‖—a core of dedicated
and trained activists ready to turn the ―fever‖ into action.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to
the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run
from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the
black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, ―The Origins of the Civil
Rights Movement,‖ a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and
disciplined groups. ―Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority
structures,‖ Morris writes. ―Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important
conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.‖

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not
about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are
the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures,
networks aren‘t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties
that bind people to the group are loose. This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in
low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn‘t have an editor, sitting in New York, who
directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in
Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that‘s what happens
when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don‘t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to
organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a
coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because
networks don‘t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty
reaching consensus and setting goals. They can‘t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict
and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when
everyone has an equal say?

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.‖

In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, ―the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists
tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were
concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and
camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.‖ They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during
police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no
such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their
comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has
dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn‘t interested in systemic change—if it just
wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn‘t need to think strategically. But if you‘re
taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott
required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from
work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott‘s
organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private
carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council,
King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with ―military precision.‖ By the time King came to
Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget
of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The
operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained
through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.
Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights
movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one
protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is
compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King‘s task in Birmingham
would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through
Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the
ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin
Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the
white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight
per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King
needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky‘s ―Here Comes Everybody.‖ Shirky, who teaches at
New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the
story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive
Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on
Ivanna‘s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the
hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his ―white ass‖ didn‘t
deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had
happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the
MySpace page of Sasha‘s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address
online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was
picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for
his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the
police, but the police filed the report under ―lost,‖ rather than ―stolen,‖ which essentially closed the case. ―By
this point millions of readers were watching,‖ Shirky writes, ―and dozens of mainstream news outlets had
covered the story.‖ Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as ―stolen.‖ Sasha was
arrested, and Evan got his friend‘s Sidekick back.

Shirky‘s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—
and he‘s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been
publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn‘t have
bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to
Shirky, illustrates ―the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause‖ in the
Internet age.

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the
weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere
in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity
and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express
themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well
suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If
you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you.
But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, ―What happens next?‖—no doubt
imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is
more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back
from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦
Technology

The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

(Unless It Is)
Oct. 8 2010 - 7:24 pm | By DAVE PELL

For those who were sure that Twitter, Facebook and the realtime web
could either manufacture or replace personal qualities such as being
courageous, determined, selfless, disciplined, steadfast, and having a
charismatic ability to inspire and lead others in moments of great
historical importance, I’ve got some bad news. It turns out that’s not case. In his recent New Yorker
piece, Small Change, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the social web does not fundamentally change the
nature of revolutions. As an example, he describes the Civil Rights sit-ins that began in Greensboro,
North Carolina in 1960.

By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every
student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist
Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone
wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and
untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that
engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or
Twitter.

Yes, folks. The Civil Rights movement took place at a time before Twitter. For those scoring at home,
the same is true for every notable historical event from the Big Bang through the release of Destiny
Child’s Bootlylicious video.

The realtime, social web is clearly not a required element to organize and execute a high impact
revolution. Neither is a megaphone, but it sure makes it easier for the folks in the back to hear you.

Gladwell goes on to argue that that Facebook and Twitter create a kind of connectedness that is
ultimately the opposite of what’s required for true activism.

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 … 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.

I don’t know about you, but my Facebook and Twitter communities are made up of both weak-ties and
strong ones. I have several family members and best friends with whom I share an online connection. I
would label them as strong ties. I also share online content with many people who I’ve never met.
Ultimately, it seems a bit foolish to separate our online and offline relationships into these defined
buckets. The lines are clearly blurred. Our online worlds are an extension of our offline lives.

What’s the point of arguing that a communications platform doesn’t replace the personal and group
characteristics required for activism? Of course Twitter and Facebook can no more do that than could
two cans attached by a string. But it seems equally absurd to argue that communicating through the
most modern channels will somehow erase those activism-driving traits.

Can you imagine someone saying, “I almost convinced my fellow member of an oppressed group to
join me in the struggle for equal rights but in the end he was turned off by my decision to use a
telephone instead of a fax machine. So he left me stranded at the lunch-counter and decided to join
Greenpeace.”

After losing his entire family as teen during the Holocaust, my dad hid in a barn that was being
searched by soldiers. When they left, he escaped and spent months alone in the forest and on the run
during a particularly cold Polish winter. I’m convinced he would have derived little benefit from
publishing a pithy tweet or unliking the Nazis on Facebook. But when he joined the Partisans, I assume
they would’ve appreciated any improved modes of communication.

The most important moment in my dad’s youth was when he got his first gun. Did that gun give him
the guts, smarts and determination required to survive World War II? No. But it sure provided an
effective channel through which to express those traits.

Activism does not require technology. And technology doesn’t stop activism.

As our minds evolve along with these new technologies, the key connection between social media and
revolutions will likely be a matter of focus. You will know about a lot more causes in the world. And
you’ll have a more efficient medium through which to share information about those causes. But it will
become increasingly difficult to focus intensely on one or two issues while blocking out the rest of the
noise.

Gladwell touches upon this point as he complains about the limitations of our social networked
connections:

It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any
impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more
efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world
needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are
still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

But again, that’s an oversimplified conclusion that places too much weight on the method of
communication at the expense of what is being communicated. Of course Facebook is not the enemy of
the status quo. Neither is the landline telephone I have in my house. People, not technologies, are
enemies of the status quo. And enabling those people to communicate more effectively is probably not
going to win a lot of fans among repressive regime stakeholders.

Ultimately our communication channels are one step removed from our personal experience and any
inherent weaknesses in the technology are beside the point. If you’re sitting at a lunch counter in
Greensboro and someone tells you to go, it’s probably not going to matter a whole lot which iPhone
model is in your pocket.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Response to Critics of His
New Yorker Piece on Social Media
“What is it about innovators that leads them to make
such extravagant claims for their ideas?”

No, I’m not asking the question. In an email response

sent to me this morning, author/journalist Malcolm
Gladwell asked it of me (albeit rhetorically).

I asked Gladwell about his feelings on the hail of

criticism he’s received recently after his piece “Small
Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted” ran
in the October 4th issue of The New Yorker. The story
questioned the role of social networking in
contemporary revolutionary activity and social
movements; Gladwell’s opening paragraphs detail a
sixties-era Woolworth’s lunchroom protest organized
“without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter” by a
group of black students who were refused service.

The latest riposte to his argument came from Twitter

co-founder Biz Stone on Tuesday with his featured
guest post on The Atlantic’s web site. “to suggest that
emerging tools like Twitter have no part to play in the
future of meaningful change is absurd,” wrote Stone.

“Little things can make a big difference.” He cites the

recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize Liu Xiaobo, and how if it were not for the underground
journalistic capacity that Twitter affords the small user base able to access it (Twitter is blocked by the
Chinese government, though some users are able to get around the barriers to entry), Liu’s prize
would go undiscussed and unreported altogether in China; the government has censored the news of
Liu’s award.

“Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one,”
Stone writes in the last paragraph of his post, “suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal. Lowering
the barrier to activism doesn’t weaken humanity, it brings us together and it makes us stronger.”

Gladwell stressed to me that he isn’t a strict hater of Stone’s site specifically, or of social media at large.
“I guess my reaction to the Stone piece – and others like it – is this. As I believe I made clear in my
piece, I am a huge fan of social media. I think it is an extraordinary tool for creating networks,
connecting people, sharing ideas and information, enabling collaboration – and on and on.”

But that’s where the extent of Gladwell’s praise ended: “I guess what baffles me about the response to
my piece is the idea that somehow Facebook and Twitter represent a new breed of perfect innovation–
and that, contrary to everything we understand about human interaction–it is possible in this case to
pursue a set of goals like sharing information and connecting people without having to make any
trade-offs at all.”
The latent trade-off on which the premise of Gladwell’s entire piece rests: “It makes it easier for
activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.“

I find it funny to think that the impact of Gladwell’s story on the blogosphere at large has been much
greater than any of his own activities within the world of social media have (it almost proves his
aforementioned point). Since he opened his first Twitter account (@Gladwell) in December of ‘08,
Gladwell has tweeted a total of 22 recorded times. His last tweet from this account was posted in
October of ‘09.

Another account (@MalcGladwell) runs the length of only 10 posts over the span of a single day, April
7th of this year. Neither account is verified – one or both may be parodies (though they lack the usual
humorous tone and read more like promotional outlets for book tours).

Gladwell has admitted his lack of engagement with social media in a Q&A session on TNY’s web site:
“I’ll confess to not being much of a Twitter reader/user myself. I think there are enough reading
materials and writing opportunities in my life already.” He does, however, seem to have a Facebook
profile and fan page.

As I spend most of my time in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley talking with budding entrepreneurs and
enthusiastic start-ups, I can very much appreciate Mr. Gladwell’s comment on the “extravagant
claims” of innovators and their ideas (believe me).

But I also read things like Monday’s reporting in The Guardian on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s intention to
use Twitter upon her eventual release, “in order to communicate with the younger generation,” says
her lawyer, Nyan Win.

I read this and wonder if a woman with such a powerful reach and strong connection to millions of
pro-democracy supporters she has never met (and may not ever meet) can use a service like Twitter
to infuse such minimal displays of self-expression with an even greater impact. Or conversely, if she
needs to even use it at all.

I wonder what Mr. Gladwell would say?

Update: Mr. Gladwell had more to say after all. It turns out he has never opened a Twitter account, and
can’t say for sure that he’s ever tweeted. The above-mentioned @Gladwell and @MalcGladwell
accounts are fakes.
The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Because Only 0.027% of
Iranians Are on Twitter
Remember the storyline about a new Iranian revolution after
the elections this summer? The one fuelled by the internet
generation? The one that got the state department to intervene
to help Iranians Twitter? Not so much.

British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher

Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture
to be published by the British Council next year. Their
statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on
figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It
shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter
that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they
provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran
when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were
afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters
are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the
ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time
of the protests:

 "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on
reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
 "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is
flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
 "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
 "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can
control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included
— loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and
shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking
YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan. The solidarity that thousands, even millions of
Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was
admirable. It was also potentially dangerous.

I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing
dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go
back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I
return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be
the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented
by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much
comfort to these people either.
 The Revolution Will Be
Tweeted
Harnessing social media's potential for
political change
BY AMY SMITH

Last May, Mona Kasra visited Iran for the first time since leaving her
native country nine years earlier. She had returned there for family reasons, but a fortuitous set of circumstances
landed her back home at a time when Iran was in the final weeks of a heady presidential race, with hard-liner
incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trying to fend off fierce opposition – most notably from Mir-Hossein Mousavi,
whose campaign platform included, of all things, equal rights for women.

The timing of Kasra's visit provided a firsthand look at how much Iran had changed, particularly for women
– still veiled but hardly silent and very much a part of the political process. "I was surprised by what then
came across as a democratic nation, very different from the Iran I remembered from my childhood," said
Kasra, an artist and educator, currently pursuing a doctorate in emerging media and communication at the
University of Texas at Dallas. "Iranians, especially the younger generation, were out openly and passionately
campaigning for their favorite candidate," Kasra recounted in an e-mail interview with the Chronicle.

Kasra will be making her second visit to SXSW Interactive, this time as a speaker on a panel discussion on
how Iranian women raised their global profile during the 2009 election by harnessing the power of social
media – a topic she pitched to SXSW Interactive organizers based on her knowledge and experience.

"On the surface, everything suggested a very open election where everybody got to support one's favorite
candidate," Kasra said. "Women's presence was very apparent during the weeks before the election. They
participated both as campaign supporters and campaign organizers." What's more, Kasra continued, "for the
first time, a candidate's wife [Mousavi's spouse, Zahra Rahnavard] was even campaigning for her husband,
which was quite a new phenomenon in Iran's political history after the revolution" – a reference to the 1979
overthrow of the country's monarchy. "Yet, as we witnessed," Kasra said, "it soon proved to be otherwise!"

The questionable "landslide" victory of Ahmadinejad in an election largely believed to be rigged touched off
a series of massive street protests, with digital media playing a pivotal role in galvanizing what became
known as the "green movement" – green representing the symbol of Mousavi's campaign and his rallying cry
for freedom of speech.

As it happened, Kasra left Iran and returned to the U.S. shortly before the June 12, 2009, election, but thanks
to the likes of Twitter and YouTube, she, like the rest of the world, followed the turn of events after the
election, watching and reading in real-time awe. Even as the Iranian government used its censorship powers
to block access to text messages and social-networking sites, Twitter persevered by virtue of its agility,
which allowed it to circumvent government-imposed cyber blockades. The U.S. Department of State even
waded into the picture, asking Twitter to delay a scheduled upgrade, which would have temporarily shut
down the network, to allow Iranians and supporters to continue their protests – to the tune of millions of hits
per day.

Did the post-election events that captured the world stage represent a revolution for Iran, or for Twitter?
Definitely Twitter, said David Parry, an emerging media professor at UT-Dallas, who will join Kasra on the
Interactive panel. "When you have the U.S. State Department asking Twitter [to delay a scheduled
shutdown], that's a revolution for Twitter. It suddenly becomes a major player" in global affairs, Parry said.

Still, the Iranian protests were not the first example of how social media played a key role in galvanizing the
masses, Parry noted. The Philippines – not exactly known as a hotbed for technological breakthroughs –
captured world attention as early as 2001 for its use of text messaging to spark dramatic protests that
ultimately led to the public ouster of President Joseph
Estrada. By comparison, a massive uprising in the United
States via text messaging would end up siphoning plenty of
wallets. "The U.S. is sort of backwards in that we charge
disproportionately more for text messaging," Parry said.

While the Iranian election may have shed light on women's

struggles for equal rights, the women's movement certainly
didn't occur overnight. As an artist who thrives on the visual
and verbal influence of emerging media, Kasra has kept a
close eye on how the women's movement has evolved over
the years. Without question, women's strength in numbers
became most apparent after last year's election. "Iranian
women have been using a variety of social media tools, the
blogosphere in particular," Kasra said. "Yet, during the after-
election unrest, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other social
networking technology provided women – and men – with the
opportunity not only to mobilize and organize, but to get the
word out, and to inform the world about the injustices. The
retweets and repostings echoed, supported, and validated their
message, even if it was by [way of] their supporters abroad,"
Kasra said.

The most shocking video posted in the election's aftermath was that of the tragic shooting death of Neda
Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman. "The video documenting her death grabbed global attention, as it
provided evidence of the extent of brutality and repression," Kasra said. "It sparked an online community
outcry. Suddenly, all avatars turned green in solidarity with the protesters in Iran who were being killed,
beaten or arrested." Today, Neda Agha-Soltan is the human face of a movement for which so many others
have lost their lives or who, according to Kasra, are still being imprisoned and tortured for speaking out.

On the whole, Iranian women have come a long way in the nine years since Kasra left her home country for
the U.S., but there are new roadblocks that threaten progress. A "family protection" bill introduced last
month would impose even more limitations on women's civil rights, particularly pertaining to alimony.
Emboldened by their increased profile in the political arena last year, however, women have already taken
steps to fight back. At press time, more than 1,200 women had signed a statement in opposition to the
proposed law, according to the Change for Equality website, as well as a number of Twitter feeds.

Chalk up another revolution for social media. And for Iranian women.
Exclusive: Biz Stone on Twitter and Activism
Oct 19 2010, 8:19 AM ET

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.
Gladwell says this fever is better described as
"a military campaign," adding that "Martin
Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned
authority." Gladwell tells us that, "the center of
the movement was the black church," and
makes a strong argument that the status quo
can only be truly challenged and changed by a
hierarchical, militarily-like organization.
Gladwell is wrong. Big change can come in
small packages too.

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. Two weeks ago, this prisoner was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his enduring, non-
violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The Chinese government censored this news
because discussion about it could lead to real impact and greater freedom in China.

Following the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen square and ensuing riots in Xinjiang that summer, Twitter
is blocked in China. Nevertheless, clever citizens have devised ways around this block and continue to use
Twitter. Professor of Internet Studies at Peking University, Hu Yong recently noted that, "Twitter is the only
place where people can talk freely about Liu's Nobel prize." Yong further explains that, "Twitter has become
a powerful tool for Chinese citizens as they increasingly play a role in reporting local news."

Twitter is a global information network made powerful by what the American sociologist Mark Granovetter
from Stanford University first theorized as "The Strength of Weak Ties." Granovetter's paper was later
popularized by the international bestselling book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big
Difference by the esteemed Malcolm Gladwell. In his book, Gladwell teaches us how Paul Revere and this
"weak-tie" phenomenon contributed to the success of The American Revolution.
Paul Revere had a broad network, a fast horse, and a catchy phrase far less than one hundred and forty
characters: "The British are coming!" In "Small Change," Mr. Gladwell admits that social media activism is
"a wonderful thing" empowering citizens with "marvelous efficiency." The American Revolution and Civil
Rights Movement were not tweeted, but to suggest that emerging tools like Twitter have no part to play in
the future of meaningful change is absurd. Little things can make a big difference.

In a recent article titled, "The Revolt of China's Twittering Classes," Professor Yong suggests that Twitter
"invites new possibilities for reshaping China's authoritarian regime," by chipping away with a process he
calls "micro-politics." According to Yong, "Recent years have seen an explosion of activities indicating that
Twitter has become the coordinating platform for many campaigns asserting citizens' rights." Bit-by-bit, the
open exchange of information provided by Twitter "can push forward real change." Yes, Mr. Gladwell, we
are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

On December 27, 2007, incumbent Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki won re-election. Due to alleged electoral
manipulation, Kibaki's swearing-in set off a wildfire of controversy which escalated into devastating ethnic
violence -- more than thirty unarmed citizens were murdered in a church on New Year's Day.

A constitutional referendum was held in Kenya this summer in an effort to prevent future politically
motivated violence. Polling stations opened early on the morning of August 4th, 2010. On this important
morning however, something was amiss. Agents of the local legislator, traveling in a government vehicle,
were harassing the long line of eager voters and urging them to say no to the new constitution. Because
balloting had already started, this was an illegal activity. Thanks to a custom version of a social media
program called Ushahidi ("Testimony" in Swahili) which gives ordinary people a voice via SMS, Twitter, or
e-mail, a perceptive Kenyan was able to alert electoral officials with a simple text message.

The Kenyan constitutional referendum passed peacefully with more than six million votes for yes and less
than three million votes for no. In a country known more to us in the West for its numerous wildlife reserves
containing thousands of animal species, there are over fifteen million active mobile phone users and
growing. The number of people who are engaging in social media activity over mobile phones is flourishing
in The Republic of Kenya and it is giving rise to a newly empowered citizenry.

Twitter users played their roles in Moldovan revolts and the political unrest in Iran but Mr. Gladwell is keen
to downplay their efforts -- and the fact that former national-security adviser Mark Pfeifle called for Twitter
to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seems only to have ruffled his feathers. Mr. Gladwell ends his
piece by highlighting a story about a lost mobile phone suggesting Twitter is only good for helping "Wall
Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls," and closes smugly with, "Viva la revolución."

"Small Change" dismisses leaderless, self-organizing systems as viable agents of change. A flock of birds
flying around an object in flight has no leader yet this beautiful, seemingly choreographed movement is the
very embodiment of change. Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to
move together as one--suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal. Lowering the barrier to activism doesn't
weaken humanity, it brings us together and it makes us stronger.

Biz Stone - Biz Stone is a co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter Inc. and also helped to
create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo and Obvious. He has published two books about
blogging.
The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted…
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Oct 5, 2009 in Commentary • 6 comments

… at least not if ―law enforcers‖

get their way.

During the G-20 summit in the

Pittsburgh area last week, police
arrested two activists. These
particular activists weren‘t
breaking windows. They weren‘t
setting cars on fire. They weren‘t
even parading around brandishing
giant puppets and chanting anti-
capitalist slogans.

In fact, they were in a hotel room

in Kennedy, Pennsylvania, miles
away from ―unsanctioned‖ protests
in Lawrenceville … listening to the
radio and availing themselves of
the hotel‘s Wi-Fi connection. Now they stand accused of ―hindering apprehension, criminal use of a
communication facility and possessing instruments of crime.‖

The radio they were listening to was (allegedly) a police scanner. They were (allegedly) using their Internet
access to broadcast bulletins about police movements in Lawrenceville to activists at the protests, using
Twitter.

Is that a crime? Should it be a crime?

There are lots of good reasons to avoid contact with the police that don‘t imply any connection with truly
criminal activity. In fact, it‘s easy to argue — so I will — that if police are actually responding to real
crimes, avoiding the police means avoiding getting caught in the middle of real crime scenes.

If, on the other hand, the police are themselves the real criminals, as is often the case, avoiding them is
nothing more or less than preemptive, non-violent self-defense and makes even more sense. Remember, this
time last year police in Denver, Colorado were yukking it up over an in-club t-shirt bearing the slogan ―We
get up early to BEAT the crowds,‖ referring to their role in the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

But enough of that. The Pittsburgh Two weren‘t arrested for committing, or facilitating any real ―crime.‖
They were arrested because agents of the state fear and loathe any gathering or event they do not control, and
any use — or even possession — of tools or technology which might conceivably reduce or frustrate their
ability to do … well, whatever the hell they feel like doing.

That fear and loathing is entirely justified. Every major new technological development threatens the status
quo, and the increasing pace of such development over the last few decades makes for a grumpy, embattled
state.
The trend has only gained momentum with the introduction of things like networks which don‘t depend on
single central servers, or which operate easily across the imaginary lines politicians draw on the ground to
mark their turf (―borders‖), or which are impossible to snuff out by taking down a single node or even a set
of nodes.

These newer technologies terrify agents of the state for two reasons.

First, they‘re equalizers for those fighting against the state, whatever form the fight may take. The Pittsburgh
Two are a good example– and don‘t assume that because they got caught, they lost. More on that in a minute.

Secondly, and more importantly, they make it easy for a variety of individuals and groups to simply ignore
and avoid the state. Building the new stateless society in the shell of the old statist one is getting a lot easier
lately — and remember, we‘re only seeing little bits of that construction activity. The ―underground
economy‖ is — duh — mostly underground. If it looks like a two-story building from street level, those two
stories are probably sitting atop 80 basement levels.

Government as we know it is engaged in a battle for its very survival, and that battle, as I‘ve mentioned
before, looks in key respects a lot like the Recording Industry Association of America‘s fight with peer-to-
peer ―file-sharing‖ networks. The RIAA can — and is — cracking down as hard as it can, in every way it can
think of, but it is losing the fight and there‘s simply no plausible scenario under which it can expect to
emerge victorious. The recording industry as we know it will change its business model, or it will go under.

The Pittsburgh Two are wonderfully analogous to the P2P folks. Their arrest boils down, for all intents and
purposes, to a public debugging session. Pittsburgh Two 2.0 will set their monitoring stations further from
the action (across jurisdictional lines), use a relay system to get the information to those stations in a timely
manner, then retransmit that information using offshore and anonymizing proxies. The cops won‘t get within
50 miles of finding Pittsburgh Two 2.0, and anything they do to counter its efficacy will be countered in
subsequent versions.

The big dissimilarity in the RIAA/government analogy is that government can’t change its business model
without ceasing to be government. Heads we win, tails they lose.
Is Social Networking Useless for Social Change? A
Response to The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell
What if anything is the potential contribution of web-based "social networking" to social movements and social
change? October 8, 2010

An October 4 New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell, "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be
Tweeted" poses an important question: What if anything is the potential contribution of web-based "social
networking" to social movements and social change? The article's answer, drawing primarily on an account
of the civil rights movement, is that social movements that are strong enough to impose change on powerful
social forces require both strong ties among participants and hierarchical organizations -- the opposite of the
weak ties and unstructured equality provided by social networking websites.

Gladwell deserves credit for kicking off a discussion of this question, but that discussion needs to go far
beyond the answers he provides, both in conceptual clarity and in historical perspective. This is a modest
contribution to that discussion.

For starters, a bit of conceptual clarification. Social networking websites are not a form of organization at all;
they are a means of communication. Comparing Twitter to the NAACP is like comparing a telephone to a
PTA. They are not the same
thing, they don't perform the
same kind of functions and
therefore their effectiveness or
lack thereof simply can't be
compared.

There are other category

problems as well. "Small
Change" juxtaposes "networks"
and "hierarchies." It conflates
"strong ties" with "hierarchical"
organizations. It denies that
strong ties can occur as part of
networks.These three conceptual
presuppositions, which underlie
the article's concrete historical
analysis, deserve some serious
reconsideration.

Economists and social scientists have traditionally divided organizations into "markets" and "hierarchies."
Both coordinate multiple players, but in different ways. Markets are based on decentralized exchanges that
lead to coordination by "feedback" from past transactions. (People raise or lower their prices based on how
much demand there has been for what they are selling, leading in theory to the production of the right
amount of different kinds of stuff.) Hierarchies -- armies and corporations, for example -- are based on a
centralized control structure that plans coordinated activity and then commands subordinates to implement
their assigned pieces of it.

More recently, some interpreters have pointed out that there is a third form, which they have dubbed
"networks." Networks coordinate by means of the sharing of information and voluntary mutual adjustment
among participants. They are different from markets because their planning is proactive and based on
knowledge of other participants' intentions and capabilities, rather than on feedback from past transactions.
They are different from hierarchies because their decision-making is decentralized and voluntary rather than
centralized and authoritative.

How do the historical experiences of the civil rights movement analyzed in "small change" look in the light
of such a clarified set of categories? There has been a vast amount of historical research on the history of the
civil rights movement over the past few years. Visible actions like marches, sit-ins, and bus boycotts rested
on a deep foundation of culture, social linkages, and accumulated experience of struggle in Black
communities in the South. These connections, stretching over generations and diverse spheres of life, were
the mulch from which the civil rights movement emerged -- or, perhaps more aptly, became visible to others
on the outside. These linkages can be appropriately described as local community networks -- means of
coordinating action based in information sharing rather than on either on a market or a command hierarchy.

Far from being able to command the action of these local networks, national civil rights leaders and
organizations were largely dependent on them. In general, local leaders made the decision of whether, for
example, to bring Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) into town,
and they were generally able to veto strategic decisions they did not agree with. They used the national
leadership and organizations for their own purposes at least as much as the other way around. This picture
represents anything but a hierarchy in which national leaders and organizations (or even local ones) were
able to command participation the way it is done in an army, a corporation, or a similar "hierarchical
organization."

Examining the Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter sit-in that touched off the sit-down wave of 1960, "Small
Change" takes the personal "strong ties" among the initial Greensboro sit-downers as the key to their
participation. Two were roommates and all had gone to the same high school, smuggled beer into their dorm
room, remembered the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and Little Rock. They
discussed the idea of a Woolworth sit-in for a month. They were a "product" of the NAACP Youth Council
(although "small change" doesn't even mention whether that organization played a role in the sit-in, let alone
organized it.) They had close ties with the head of the local NAACP chapter. They had been briefed on
previous sit-ins and attended "movement meetings in activist churches."

What social relations could be less hierarchical than this description? What could better fit the image of the
dense social networks of a community in struggle? Would the results have been the same or better had an
official of a civil rights organization come into town and tried to command those four students to go to
Woolworth's and sit in?

"Small Change" similarly argues that such "strong ties" made the difference between volunteers who did and
did not stay with the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The volunteers who stayed with Mississippi Freedom
Summer "were far more likely than dropouts to have "close friends who were also going to Mississippi."

Such personal connections are undoubtedly important, but they are hardly the same thing as a hierarchy. The
view that such strong ties contribute to the emergence of deep commitment is surely not the same as the
claim that hierarchy is necessary to produce such commitment.

"Small Change" goes on to describe pre-Greensboro sit-ins that were formally organized by civil rights
organizations and maintains that this argues against a "network" interpretation of the sit-down
movement. But it doesn't raise the question of why these more formally organized sit-downs didn't spread
and become a movement in the way that the Greensboro sit-in -- initiated by four high school freshmen who
apparently were not even members of any organization at the time -- did.
"Small Change" describes the civil rights movement as "like a military campaign" that was "mounted with
precision and discipline." Anybody who participated or has reviewed recent research on its history will likely
find this description unfamiliar to say the least. Some of the SNCC kids from the Albany, Georgia campaign
were even heard to say (perhaps over-deprecating their own strategic acumen) that they had no idea what
they were doing. They just kept jumping around until they landed on someone's toes and they hollered and
that's how the Albany kids found out who was really opposing them.

"Small Change" points out that "The NAACP was a centralized organization." True enough. But the civil
rights movement of the 1950s and 60s came about explicitly as a break with the policies and domination of
the NAACP, an attempt to break out from its hegemony. And the NAACP had a very ambiguous
relationship, to say the least, to the direct action civil rights movement.

In the SCLC "Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority." Really? Nobody challenged the fact
that he was the leader, but the massively researched biographies of King show that he was being challenged
all the time on strategy and policy both by his lieutenants and by the local leadership of the movements he
was brought in to "lead." Michael Honey's magnificent book "Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis
Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign" makes clear just how much authority King exercised over local
leaders and other "followers" (authority: none; influence -- even that was pretty marginal a lot of the time).

According to "Small Change," the "black church" was a hierarchical organization in which the minister
"usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation." But there were scores of different black
churches in each city. In any one, the minister might be able to exercise authority (though if parishioners
didn't like what the minster did they could and did switch to other churches). But the idea that these churches
collectively represented a unity with a single authority is doubtful. Certainly it does not assort well with
historical research portraying the difficulties Martin Luther King, Jr. had holding together the different
Montgomery churches during the bus boycott. Crucially, did black ministers have enough authority to order
their parishioners to go to jail? Or did the commitment of movement participants come from something other
than a command hierarchy?

The idea that the civil rights movement as a whole expressed some kind of unity of command is also
dubious. The SCLC was formed because King was unable to win the black Baptist denominations to support
his vision. SNCC kids derisively referred to Dr. King as "de Laud." The counter-examples could go on and
on.

The capabilities "Small Change" attributes to hierarchies sometimes reach the level of the awesome. It
maintains, for example that networks are unlike hierarchies in that they are "prone to conflict and error."
Hierarchies are not "prone to conflict and error?"

"Small Change" points out that digital communication would have been of no use in Montgomery, Alabama,
"a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at
church." But does that mean that committed social activism is simply impossible among people who do not
have that kind of pre-existing face-to-face connection? If so, there must be no examples in which powerful,
committed social movements have developed among people who don't see each other every weekend in
church.

This brings us back to the role of social media. Gladwell is surely right when he says social media "are not a
natural enemy of the status quo." But that is only the beginning of the discussion. The pertinent question is
whether social media can contribute to the process of forming social movements and effective social action,
not whether social media can substitute for that process. (A telephone system is not a PTA, but it can sure as
heck be useful for getting a few hundred people out to confront the school board or vote in the school board
election.)
The evidence here is pretty clear. Social networking websites can play and are playing an important role in
finding and connecting people who are beginning to think and feel similar things.They can help participants
deepen their understanding and form common perspectives. They can help inform those who use them of
possible courses of action.

This doesn't in itself substitute for many of the other things movements need, and need to do. It does not in
itself create the kinds of "strong ties" that help give a movement strength, although it may help people find
others with whom they want to develop strong ties. (Compare computer-initiated dating, which in itself only
connects potential partners but in fact has connected many people who thereupon partnered and married.)

Beyond group formation is the question of power. As Gladwell indicates, ten thousand people sending each
other tweets doth not a revolution make, or even major social change. Whatever else, significant social
change requires, as Gandhi put it, "noncooperation" with the status quo and a "matching of forces" with
those who would maintain it. Social networking cannot in itself provide either of these. But it can be a
powerful tool for making such expressions of power possible.

This is not the first time that the relation between social movements and new forms of communication has
been considered. A once-influential study published in 1847 observed that workers were beginning to form
"combinations"; to "club together in order to keep up the rate of wages"; and to found "permanent
associations" to make provision beforehand for occasional revolts. The consequence was an "expanding
union of the workers."

This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that
place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to
centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.

Maybe the role of telegraph and newspapers a century and two-thirds ago is irrelevant to the role of social
networking media today. But maybe not.

Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher are the editors, with Jill Cutler, of In the Name of Democracy, American War
Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan, 2005). Brecher, a historian who has authored more than a dozen books
including Strike!, writes for the Nation magazine among other publications. For his documentary film work he has
received five regional Emmy Awards. Legal scholar Brendan Smith (blsmith28@gmail.com), a former senior
congressional aide specializing in defense and human rights policy, is coauthor of Globalization from Below, and has
written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the Baltimore Sun.
Memo to Malcolm Gladwell: Nice Hair, But You
Are Wrong
By MATHEW INGRAM of GigaOm Published:
October 19, 2010

New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell‘s

erudite skewering of various cultural
phenomena, something he has become famous
(or possibly infamous) for, tends to produce a
strong reaction in those who are close to the
topics he takes on, and his recent analysis of
Twitter and its potential uses as a tool for
social activism is no exception. In the several
weeks since he wrote the original piece, over
half a dozen essays and blog posts from a
variety of sources have come out arguing that
he is wrong, and today, The Atlantic magazine
joined the fray with a guest essay by none other
than Twitter co-founder Biz Stone that took
issue with his conclusions. (The title of this
post comes from a message that Stone posted
to Twitter about his essay.)

Gladwell‘s article was entitled ―Small Change:

Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,‖
and started with an evocative image: a group of
black college students holding a sit-in at a Woolworth‘s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. in 1960, to
protest racism: an event that triggered subsequent rallies and demonstrations throughout the southern U.S.
All this, Gladwell says, ―happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.‖ The author then goes on
to puncture the conventional wisdom that Twitter had anything much to do with revolutions in Moldova or
Iran, and says that ―fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American
history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.‖

The New Yorker writer‘s point is clear: real activism involves sit-ins and getting shot at, not sitting at a
keyboard posting things on Twitter or text messaging. It‘s hard to disagree with this; no one would argue that
posting a comment to Twitter while sipping a latte at Starbucks is activism, simply because you happen to
use the #iran hashtag. But is Gladwell making a fair comparison? I don‘t think so. As other critics such as
Anil Dash have also argued, setting up a contrast between Twitter and anti-racism demonstrations in the
1960s is effectively a straw-man argument, which allows the author to slam the social network for not doing
things that no one has ever really claimed it was trying to do.

One of Gladwell‘s central arguments is that Twitter and other social media tools emphasize — and are
powered by — what sociologists call ―weak ties‖ between individuals (a term coined by Mark Granovetter):
that is, the kind of ties that you have to your co-workers, or friends from high school, or people who belong
to the same clubs as you. Gladwell says that real activism only occurs as a result of strong ties, the kind that
people have to their churches, their families, and to strong leaders, and that real revolutions require a
hierarchy that is antithetical to social media like Twitter. In his Atlantic essay, Biz Stone says: ―Gladwell is
wrong. Big change can come in small packages too‖ (Stone and co-founder Ev Williams made similar points
in a recent Q & A discussion).

By that, the Twitter founder means that even weak ties can help pull people together around causes in ways
that matter. He uses several examples, including the case of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident who is in prison
for writing about human rights, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Has Twitter led to his release? No. But as
Stone argues, it has given Chinese citizens a way of talking about him, something that they would otherwise
not have done — as described in a recent blog post by Hu Yong, a professor of Internet studies at Peking
University. Yong said Twitter was ―the only place where people can talk freely‖ about Liu and his ideas, and
that it has become ―a powerful tool for Chinese citizens.‖ Burmese democracy fighter Aung San Suu Kyi,
imprisoned for more than 15 years, has said when she is released one of the first things she wants to do is get
a Twitter account so she can communicate with her supporters.

In her response to Gladwell‘s piece, author Maria Popova describes several cases in which Facebook helped
spark ―real‖ social activism, including public protests in Colombia in 2008 that saw close to 5 million people
participate in protests against the country‘s armed forces, and a campaign in Bulgaria in 2009 that resulted in
the largest public protests since the fall of communism, and led to the resignation of several Parliament
members. As others have noted in their criticisms, Gladwell seems to see activism as an either-or
proposition: Either you use social media, in which case it‘s ineffective and useless, or you gather in the
streets and do real activism. But wouldn‘t some of those demonstrators in 1960 have loved to have better
ways of getting their message out to as many people as possible?

While I was reading Gladwell‘s piece, in my head I replaced any mention of Twitter or Facebook with the
words ―the telephone,‖ and then it became a diatribe about how people talking on the telephone has never
amounted to anything in terms of social activism. That is probably just as true as his criticisms of Twitter.
But would any modern social effort or campaign or demonstration be effective without someone making
phone calls? Twitter and Facebook are just tools, and they can be used for social good in the same way any
other tool can. And those ―weak ties‖ can eventually grow into strong ones.

As Stone notes at the end of his essay: ―Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows
many to move together as one — suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal.‖ And that is a positive thing
for social change, not a negative one.