A monument to the idea

Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker has made a grand statement about social media and its ineffectiveness at fomenting and executing revolution. The crux of Gladwell’s argument is that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are built around “weak ties”, and that such a mode of organisation is not conducive to high-stakes protest. The internet, Gladwell says, is “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.”

That is a bold statement to make – and a wrong one. Look at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The student protestors of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square that year effectively constituted one giant Facebook group (as Gladwell would imagine it) – a group of dissenters bound only by weak ties: shared demographics and an ill-defined desire for political reform.

Last year, I interviewed one of those protesters, Dean Peng, for a story about the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Peng told me, with regret, that the protests were a “total failure” because they were poorly prepared and had no specific focus other than a general feeling of discontent and desire for reform. These brave protesters were facing off against a government that proved to be uncompromising, violent, and willing to crush its own people. It is one of the most stirring and important demonstrations of high-risk activism of the past century. And you can bet that if those protesters had access to a Xiaonei or a Fanfou, they would have been using the hell out of it to amplify their voices and get more bodies to the square.

Therein lies another glaring problem with Gladwell’s position. He undermines and willfully mischaracterises social media’s role in activism. Facebook or Twitter are seldom the only prong in activism’s pitchfork. They are supplements to revolution. Gladwell points to the recent anti-government demonstrations in Iran and quotes a critic who says that the role of Twitter in the Iranian demonstrations was overblown and that Western journalists who couldn’t reach or bother reaching people on the ground in Iran just quoted from Twitter instead of actual reporting.

Here, Gladwell is framing Twitter as a primary tool of protest, when in fact that’s not what it was: it was a conduit for difficult-to-get information. Not only did it not stop reporters trying to reach people on the ground, but it also encouraged more reporting from more reporters and non-traditional sources who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to information from the events. So, Gladwell is not wrong in suggesting what happened in Iran was not a “Twitter Revolution”, but he is disingenuously shifting the goal posts. Twitter, in this case, was an amplifier, a tool that helped dignify the efforts of those high-risk activists on the ground  and make their messages heard loud and clear around the world.

On the other hand, Gladwell would be remiss not to consider the case of Hu Jia, a Chinese human rights activist who used social media – blogging – as a central tool for his high-risk activism, until his actions landed him in jail.

Gladwell continues constructing strawmen. “The evangelists of social media… 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.” Well, I’m not an evangelist of social media – I find both Facebook and Twitter very useful professionally and fun for keeping tabs on people, but I get enormously frustrated by some of their other characteristics (that’s another post entirely) – but I don’t mind defending such people here. I don’t know anyone who thinks a Facebook friend is equivalent to a real friend, and what buffoon thinks that signing up for a donor registry is akin to to the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins? Gladwell certainly doesn’t name anyone. A primary school child could grasp the distinction between these two kinds of activism, and that has nothing to do with whether or not that child is logged in to Facebook. Donor registry and civil rights sit-ins are at completely opposite ends of the spectrum of activism, and I can’t even imagine an entity that would try to equate the two. Oh wait, yes I can – someone who is trying to construct a provocative and too-sweeping grand statement in an international magazine about a medium he clearly doesn’t fully understand.

Still, Gladwell labours on with his ham-fisted argument. “Social networks are effective at increasing participation,” he notes, ”by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.” This is not a mind-blowing insight. It is easy to find thousands of groups on Facebook dedicated to causes that group members have no intent of truly investing themselves in. This, Mr Gladwell, is the flippant side of a social network that serves as a gathering point for 500 million people. Not every one of the people who subscribe to a Save Darfur Facebook group is actually going to put their full energies into trying to save Darfur. That’s not really much of a surprise. Nor is it surprising that the 2,705 members of the group Homework Is Gay are yet to picket schools in any country. (We can only live in hope.) Similarly, not everyone who signs a petition – with an old-fashioned pen on honest-to-God paper – outside a shopping mall in small-town Alexandra, New Zealand, is going to take the good fight to council to prevent the installation of round-about on the main road.

This leads us to Gladwell’s “second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant”: social media are tools for building networks, which are the opposite to hierarchies, which, in Gladwell’s opinion, produce more effective activism. There are a couple of problems with this. First, Gladwell assumes that networks and hierarchies are mutually exclusive. Is it inconceivable that a company or a political organisation or even a beehive can act as networks relying on collective strength while also possessing in-built hierarchical systems that intelligently direct resources? Not to me.

Second, who says hierarchical structures can’t exist within, or alongside, a Facebook group or an army of Twitter users? I recently spoke with former New York Times and International Herald Tribune journalist Thomas Crampton, who is now head of social media for Ogilvy PR in Asia. His role is to help companies that are especially reliant on hierarchies use the likes of Facebook and Twitter to communicate with people in the most effective possible ways. This meeting of hierarchy and network suggests there is at least some potential for social media in the field of high-risk activism. As people in Crampton’s field will attest, not every influential Facebook group is a result of an organic, grassroots-led network effect. There is, Mr Gladwell, orchestration, manipulation, contrivance, scheming, structure, and, yes, even hierarchy in the madcap world of social media.

Gladwell uses the Greensboro sit-ins, a key moment in America’s civil rights struggle, as the central metaphor for his thesis. He writes of the demonstrations:

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.

That is true, but it is also cynical and reductive. The demonstrations also didn’t happen without communicating, and that’s where email, texting, Facebook, and Twitter excel. They may not be the drivers of revolution (which is not to say they could not be), but they can be (which is not to say they are always) incredibly useful at spreading vital messages. Any statement about social media that is less nuanced than that is worthy of your suspicion.

Ultimately, Gladwell is asking the wrong question of the Greensboro sit-ins. He is obsessed with the notion that no such movement could be driven by social media. Instead, he should be asking whether or not those students, if they had the chance, would be tweeting from the lunch counter. But that’s a harder one to answer.

Further reading: Another rebuttal, from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.