After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell — who wrote a widely-read New Yorker article about how inconsequential social media is when it comes to “real” social activism — has finally weighed in with his thoughts on the subject. But he continues to miss the real point about the use of Twitter and Facebook, which is somewhat surprising for the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point.
Although the topic of social media’s role in events in Tunisia and Egypt — and also in Iran and other countries that have recently seen citizen uprisings — has been the focus of much commentary from observers such as Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York of Global Voices Online, and from foreign affairs writer and author Evgeny Morozov, the response from Gladwell on the New Yorker’s “News Desk” blog was all of about 200 words long. In a somewhat defensive tone, Gladwell suggested that if Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had made his famous “power springs from the barrel of a gun” statement today, everyone would obsess over whether he made it on Twitter or Facebook. He concluded that while there is a lot that can be said about the protests in Egypt:
Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.
In other words, as far as the New Yorker writer is concerned, the use of any specific communications tools — whether that happens to be cellphones or SMS or Twitter or Facebook — may be occurring, and may even be helping revolutionaries in countries like Egypt in some poorly-defined way, but it’s just not that interesting. This seems like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a book all about how a series of small changes in the way people think about an issue can suddenly reach a “tipping point” and gain widespread appeal, since that’s exactly the kind of thing that social media does extremely well.
Gladwell isn’t the only one who has taken a skeptical stance when it comes to the use of social media in such situations. Morozov, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, is also the author of a book called “Net Delusion,” in which he argues that the views of some “cyber-utopians” are in danger of distorting political discourse, and convincing some politicians and bureaucrats that all people require in order to overthrow governments is Internet access and some Twitter followers (Cory Doctorow critiqued the book recently in The Guardian). This view was echoed in a recent piece in BusinessWeek entitled “The Fallacy of Facebook Diplomacy,” which argued that “the idea that America can use the Internet to influence global events is more dream than reality.”
But as sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argues in a blog post responding to Gladwell — and as we argued in a recent post here — the point is not that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook cause revolutions in any real sense. What they are very good at doing, however, is connecting people in very simple ways, and making those connections in a very fast and distributed sort of way. This is the power of a networked society and of cheap, real-time communication networks.
As Tufekci notes, what happens in social networks is the creation of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” in a seminal piece of research in the 1970s (PDF link) — that is, the kinds of ties you have to your broader network of friends and acquaintances, as opposed to the strong ties that you have to your family or your church or your close friends. But while Gladwell more or less dismissed the value of those ties in his New Yorker piece about how little value social media has when it comes to “real” activism, Tufekci argues that these weak ties can become connected to our stronger relationships, and that’s when real change can occur.
New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity.
In places like Tunisia and Egypt, for example, individuals or small groups might be thinking about or working towards revolution, but it isn’t until they connect with other people or groups — or see evidence of others who feel the same — that this tips over into actual activity. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas said recently, social-media tools can be a powerful “accelerant” in those situations. A recent report from the security consulting agency Stratfor looked at how social media can be used by activist groups to spread their message and co-ordinate activities.
That’s not to say that the question of who is using which tool is inherently more interesting than the actual human acts of bravery and risks that people in Tunisia and Egypt have taken, or are taking — but those tools and that activity can bring things to a tipping point that might otherwise not have occurred, or spur others (possibly even in other countries) to do something similar. And that is interesting — or should be — regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might think.