“Social media can’t provide what social change has always required,” argues Malcolm Gladwell in the Oct. 4 issue of the New Yorker in a fascinating article that challenges a lot of assumptions about the power of the internet. He pokes holes into the overheated stories that protest in Tehran or Moldova were aided by Twitter or Facebook.
So inflated are the claims that a former U.S. national security adviser, Mark Pfeifle, called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Pfeifle wrote.
Yeah, but, counters Gladwell, the ones twittering about Iran were not in Iran. He quotes an Iranian journalist: “Western journalists who couldn’t reach — or didn’t bother reaching? — people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets posted with tag #iranelection. 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.”
And as to Moldova’s Twitter Revolution? It seems, “Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist.”
All new technologies overstate their importance, Gladwell reminds us. True enough: We still don’t live in a paperless society, the mop and the vacuum cleaner are still much needed tools, and we still have to prepare meals instead of having them appear from a machine in the wall. Gladwell writes, “Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history [the Civil Rights movement], we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”
The deep social change begun at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, was based on relationships and orga — nization. The four young men who first sat down in that Woolworth’s that one Monday in 1960 were friends. “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.”
What those men did was dangerous — “high-risk activism” — but they did it because they were highly committed and had strong ties to each other.
By comparison, “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 not necessarily a bad thing. A single posting on my Facebook page about the Flemingdon Gateway Mission was cut and pasted and spread to several hundred people from my old high school. Similarly a posting about my mother’s death spread quickly to friends and family. It was an efficient, if somewhat impersonal, way to sharing the news.
“The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition,” Gladwell writes, “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 35 cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, 15 cents. … 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.”
What activism requires, Gladwell insists, is what it has always required: Leadership, hierarchy, commitment, sacrifice and, most importantly, supportive relationships. It is one thing to hit “Like” on a Facebook page, quite another to make a personal commitment of money, time, skills. You have to care about something deeply to bother doing something about it. In the end, it’s the virility of our relationships and not the virality of our amusements that matters.
