Gladwell sparked quite the social media flare when he claimed recently that social media pundits greatly overestimate social media’s ability to effect social change. He compared the famous civil-rights era lunch-counter sit-ins to the revolutionary activity in contemporary Iran and found good, old-fashioned face-to-face relationships were a more effective mobilization tool than the new-fangled Twitter and Facebook.
Malcom Gladwell for The New Yorker
But Gladwell is wrong.
He makes the classic mistake of arguing that a particular technology may (or may not) lead to a particular result. In the real, messy, social world, X technology is not guaranteed to lead to Y results. Nor is X technology guaranteed NOT to lead to Y results. Gladwell commits the same sin as those of social media pundits he so blithely condemns. Namely, Gladwell is a technological determinist with a poor grasp of actual social interaction.
Sociologists, by contrast, recognize the social world is complex and full of exceptions. Their contribution to the phenomena of social change is far more nuanced than Gladwell suggets.
He correctly asserts that the lunch-counter sit-ins were both more effective and required more commitment from its participants. He cites Golnaz Esfandiari who shrewdly noted that Iranian tweets were written almost exclusively in English, not Farsi. The “Twitter revolution” was actually Westerners in Western places, scrolling through the tweets tagged “#iranelection.”
But he goes on to argue that activism in the Facebook Age ain’t what it used to be,
Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
Social media help us organize life but they don’t make change, he argues:
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.
Sociologists of technology have long ago found that technology has indeterminant results, which can only be understood by examining the social context in which the technology is introduced. Technology researchers Pinch and Bjiker called this “interpretive flexibility” which suggests that technologies are used differently in different social contexts.
Bicycle Mower
Pinch and Bijker introduced this idea decades ago, yet Gladwell has no grasp on these decades of socio-technical analysis.
Instead, he uses a single social theory, specifically, Granovetter’s social network theory of “weak ties” versus “strong ties.” Gladwell argues that social change requires a great deal of “strong ties,” which existed in the south at the time of the civil rights movements.
Yet he does no comparison to other examples of social change, such as the ‘60s counter-culture in general, which cannot be demonstrably be traced to a disproportionate amount of strong ties. Instead, social scientists have attributed the mass youth uprisings of the ‘60s in North America and especially France to a high number of young people with “post bourgeois” values.
Gladwell also simplistically characterizes effective organization as necessarily “hierarchical.” But sociologists know that social institutions can either enable or constrain weak or strong ties. Sociologist Mario Luis Small, for example, has shown that how organizations connect people matters, and conceivably matters more than the technology they use. Small found that daycare centres in New York City encouraged the formation of new ties between parents when they had frequent, non-competitive and regular interactions, such as meeting to plan field trips or daycare holiday parties.
Researchers have also found recently that mobile technology use actually strengthens strong ties, depending on the context in which they are used.
The lunch-counter sit-ins succeeded because they had the requisite organizational structure already in place, not because these organizations were “hierarchical” as Gladwell argues. Hierarchies are not required to create social change, as much as Lenin’s “vanguard elite” might want us to believe it.
And these lunch-counter protesters did have technology that they used to incite more activism, notably, the telephone and the newsletters and newspapers. Gladwell skates over this fact in his zeal to condemn social media.
Maybe we should cut Gladwell some slack. He is, after all, a great synthesizer and a storyteller. He succeeds in popularizing ideas that have gained little attention outside academic circles. And granted, his New Yorker post was a brief post, not a treatise.
But fans of Gladwell take note: his ideas are usually not his. Worse, he often fails to apply them in the same thoughtful, nuanced ways their originators had intended.
UPDATE: Gladwell has incited a fair number of awesome ripostes including @leighh ’s very similar post and this awesome one from Anil Dash.
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Sam, great post!
Gladwell’s argument against “weak ties” effecting change bothered me the most – especially given the amount of evidence on digital communities’ having the ability to coming together to start revolutions!
The funniest one that comes to mind is 4chan’s hijacking of the Time 100 list in 2009, where users of 4Chan managed to pull their founder – “moot” to the top of the list.
Also, having had the privilege of conducting an ethnographic study of Reddit users and having sat in on my first “real life” Reddit meetup a while back, I can vouch for the passion and collective conscience of these users – who are again connected through ‘weak ties’.
Anyhoos, thanks for this. Hope Mr. Gladwell has the opportunity to read this one!
The 4chan and Reddit examples are indeed interesting. I think Gladwell has a lot of implicit assumptions that he doesn’t even realize. Why does social change have to be organized in a “hierarchy”? Why do low-involvement organizations count for less? Gladwell has a mental model of what social change is, but he doesn’t examine it. Weak ties may indeed be a great way to disseminate information, but they can also be a great way to structure social change. Gladwell assumes that the world is still organized in a top-down way, which it is, in some ways, but he fails to recognize change at the margins.
I enjoyed the article as the kind of intellectual fairy floss Gladwell is so good at spinning. But it’s kind of weird that he ignores the temporal dimension of his analysis — the fact that fifty years have passed between the two things he’s comparing. I work in social marketing and community development for HIV prevention and I’m not sure it even remains possible to mount the kind of hierarchically-organised social movement Gladwell describes. Just getting people along to a focus group is a massive problem. Why, I’m not sure.
You’re absolutely right, Daniel. The temporality of civil rights-era US versus today’s Iran is very true. Indeed, the emergence of mobile technologies has also marked the creation of “micro planning” right up until immediately before events.
Is it possible to have a hierarchically organized social movement? Sure, look at the Tea Party. Some would say that it is a networked, grassroots movement but there is ample evidence to say that it is actually funded and directed (at least nominally) by right-wing organizations in the US. Sure, they cannot direct the way they may have in the past, but they can certainly set the agenda through back-door means.
Gladwell is a little behind the times, in this regard.
Thank you for this post. I knew that there was something about Gladwell’s article that didn’t sit well with me, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it – but it is, as you say, his reductionist approach – one driver, one result.
Jasmine
Thanks for the comment Jasmin. Of course you could be simpler even: one trick pony!