Malcolm Gladwell

Introduction

Social networks, those loose, busy and self-absorbing communities of Facebookers and Twitterers, have always invited analogies from the insect world. If we are to accept the most common of them, then in the past week, Malcolm Gladwell, provocateur-in-chief at the New Yorker magazine, has poked a sharp stick into the online ants' nest. The twitterers have responded to his provocation by swarming on to blogs and websites to protect their uniting belief: that the future belongs to them.

Gladwell is a spirited contrarian. His argument in the New Yorker was an attack on the prevalent idea that online social networks represent the future of campaigning and protest, and perhaps - in totalitarian states - of revolution. The bestselling author of The Tipping Point unpicked this notion with typical chutzpah, moving quickly from emotive and carefully selected individual case studies to sweeping universal principles.

Discussion and Analysis

Gladwell examined the most effective mass protest of modern times - the American civil rights movement. Using an account of the courageous coffee bar sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, he argued that such activism was based on the strength of intimate friendships and shared experience, and directed by hierarchical power, could never have arisen from the "weak ties" and "horizontal" associations that characterise the campaigning of online "friends" and "followers". (Lipnack, 1) At the opening of his article, Gladwell shows how the commitment, activism and how this behavior to strong involvement (see Risk), an idea was contagious when in 1960, four black students sparked a revolution in all the southern United States, simply for being denied a coffee because of their skin color.As an example of the comparative ineffectiveness of wiki-activism Gladwell cited the virtual support groups that arose at the height of the civil war in western Sudan. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition had 1,282,339 members, he noted, before detailing, with a flourish, the financial commitment of those "protesters" to their cause: an average of 15 cents each.

From this and other anecdotes Gladwell drew the following conclusion: that while social networks may be useful for some communication - to alert like-minded acquaintances to social events, or to solve a specific "weak tie" problem, such as the location of a bone marrow donor - they do not promote the passionate collective engagement that causes individuals to make commitments that result in social change. Facebook "likers", he argued, are not sitters-in or nonviolent activists, they are not even marchers or candle-wavers; they may wish to associate themselves with a protest app, but the nature of their medium means they do so with negligible risk and therefore negligible effect. (Lipnack, 1)

To many of the anonymously outraged, this was fighting talk. "Cynic" in a long and vitriolic thread on the rival Atlantic Monthly website, argued that while "once a group of local activists might have placed notices in the local paper, today, it tweets. There are important changes implicit in this transition to be sure. Organisations have a much easier time in reaching broader ...