(2010-09-29) Gladwell Online Activism Fail

Malcolm Gladwell claims that online-based activism doesn't Change The World.

Activism that challenges the StatusQuo—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 Mc Adam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor... 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, Mc Adam concluded, is a “Strong Ties” phenomenon.

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 Ties 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.

The kind of activism associated with Social Media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around Weak Ties.

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... “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 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... 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 Network-s... This structure makes networks enormously Resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations... 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... Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup Sangiovanni and CalvertJones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew... 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.”.. Similarly, AlQaeda 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. (Calling John Robb.)

• My counter: AlQaeda may not have blown up any skyscrapers recently, but after 9years, we're bankrupting our country over 2 wars, and continuing under a Democratic president to shread the US Constitution. So are they really "far less effective"?

Clay 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.

Anil Dash responds:

• The problem with Gladwell's premise, though, is that it's wildly anachronistic to think that the only way to effect social change is to assemble a sign-wielding mob to inhabit a public space. I cringe in anticipation of the day when the Tea Party realizes their protest marches will be as ineffective as the even more massive anti-Iraq war rallies were seven years ago. People who want to see marches in the streets are often unwilling to admit that those marches just don't produce much in the way of results in America in 2010. I think Gladwell would respond that individual marches didn't do much ever, it was the strategically managed rolling series of events that added up.

• However: There are revolutions, actual political and legal revolutions, that are being led online. They're just happening in new ways, and taking subtle forms unrecognizable to those who still want a revolution to look like they did in 1965. He points to his earlier essay on Intellectual Property: So what happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? What if it's something more contentious or fundamental than intellectual property law? What are the implications of the increasing disconnect between the letter of the law and its practice?

• Today, Dale Dougherty and the dozens of others who have led MakerFaire, and the culture of "making", are in front of a movement of millions who are proactive about challenging the constrictions that law and corporations are trying to place on how they communicate, create and live... The lesson that simply making things is a radical political act has enormous precedence in political history... To his last day, my great-grandfather wore khadi, the handspun clothing that didn't just represent independence from the British Raj in an abstract way, but made defiance of onerous British regulation as plain as the clothes on one's back... More importantly, the jobs that many of us have in 2030 will be determined by young people who attended a Maker Faire, in industries that they've created. There is no other political movement in America today with a credible claim at creating the jobs of the future.

• I think Anil is implicitly saying that there's a revolution in creating new practices and institutions that Route Around obsolete ones. I Commented to say that assumes that BigWorld lets you do that - look at people getting arrested for buying/selling Raw Milk. (War On The Net)

  • Tyler Cowen disagrees with my point. Most unsettled issues in American politics today would not be well-served by organizing less cooperative confrontations, even if you perceive a great injustice. I believe that "making the existing social order" more efficient, to use Gladwell's phrase, is positively correlated with many desirable reforms. I Commented to ask him for examples.

Stowe Boyd responds:

• "But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism." Well, they haven’t in the past, perhaps in part because these tools have only existed for a few years... But I believe that we will have to wait for deeper research into the shape and arc of today’s revolutions, which increasingly are likely to be diffused, like networks, and relying on weak ties.

• I think Gladwell needs to look at the little r revolutions going on all around us, like the urban food movement, Grameen-style microloan systems, and others. This is where social tools will change the world, one weak tie at a time.

• Alan Patrick says (after reading Stowe's piece): I think Albert Laszlo Barabasi and Bob May would agree with Stowe's views, but also point out that if some nodes got too big (which being a human system they would probably predict they will without some form of governance), there would be major problems!

Alexis Madgrigal notes The thing about Twitter, at least for me, is that I end up meeting the people that I interact with most closely... What Twitter lacks in corporeal contact, I think it makes up in longevity... University of Maryland-Baltimore sociologist Zeynep Tufecki also points out that, as in my case, lots of weak ties beget some strong ties. "The relationship between weak and strong ties is one of complementarity and support, not one of opposition. Gladwell has written about weak and strong ties before and continues a tradition of contrasting them as ontological opposites, somehow opposing and displacing each other," Tufecki writes on her blog Technosociology. "That is a widespread conceptual error and rests upon an inadequate understanding of these concepts. Large pools of weaker ties are crucial to being able to build robust networks of stronger ties -- and Internet use is a key to this process." See the comments, esp those he highlighted. I Commented.