In Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” he argues that “strong-tie” relationships — bonds among people who share intense personal connections — are necessary to any serious activist project. Because online organizing builds on “weak-tie” relationships, he suggests, the world of Twitter and Facebook is unsuited to substantial, world-changing activism.
The centerpiece of Gladwell’s essay is his retelling of the story of the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Gladwell is right to note that the first of those sit-ins sprung from the strong-tie friendships among its student organizers at North Carolina A&T. He rightly notes as well that established activists throughout the South did much to facilitate the growth of the campaign in the weeks and months that followed. But he neglects the role that pre-internet social networking — ad hoc communication among college students connected through fraternities and sororities, loose friendship clusters, student governments, or just shared hang-out spaces — played in spreading the word and building the movement.
And if you’re looking for weak-tie organizing in the activism of the sixties, the civil rights movement — church-led, small-town-based, building on the preparatory work of decades of communal struggle — is the wrong place to start, anyway. The right place to start is the student movement centered on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Where SNCC, the sixties’ main student-led civil rights group, emerged as a “beloved community” of organizers bound by the strongest of strong ties, and struggled after it outgrew that intimacy, SDS achieved its greatest success as a loose confederation of far-flung chapters. In SDS’s heyday its members shared no single ideology, no strong bonds of personal connection, no uniformity of tactics or strategy. What they shared was a sense of being part of a movement, of something called SDS.
SDS never had a particularly large staff, but it did have a few organizers that it would send out into the field. These staffers would check the organization’s records, figure out where there were opportunities to build new chapters, and hit the road.
And when they did, they would regularly make strange discoveries. They’d arrive on a campus that they thought would be a good candidate for a new outpost, find a couple of likely activists, start making their pitch, and get a quizzical look in return. “If you folks are from SDS, you should really be talking to Janice and Stanley. They’re the co-chairs of our SDS group. Have been for a couple of years now.”
Local SDS chapters were often forged out of strong-tie bonds, of course, but that’s not how the group spread on the national level. On the national level, students would read about SDS in Newsweek, or hear about it in a letter from a friend, or see a rally on TV, and think “we should do that here.” And then they would, and a lot of time they wouldn’t bother to send in membership dues, show up at national conferences, or file a charter with the main office. They’d just do their thing.
SDS wasn’t so much a national organization as a national idea.
Gladwell’s primary examples of contemporary online organizing — Iran, Darfur — are ones in which the barriers to Westerners moving beyond low-level involvement are extraordinarily high. Other than putting a badge on our Twitter icons or donating a few bucks to Doctors Without Borders, there’s really not much that most of us can do about a political crisis halfway around the world. And so our organizing on those issues is inevitably going to be haphazard and short-lived.
In taking these crises as his model, though, Gladwell adopts an all-or-nothing approach to the question of whether activism is “serious.” If you’re not sitting in at a lunch counter, he suggests, or on the ground in Tehran, you’re not doing much of anything. But one of his own examples of weak-tie organizing reveals the poverty of that binary conception.
A few years ago a Silicon Valley entrepreneur was diagnosed with leukemia, and discovered that because his ethnic group — South Asians — was underrepresented in the national bone marrow registry, there was no suitable match for him on file. His business partner launched an internet campaign to recruit South Asians to the registry, one that ultimately added 24,000 people to the list.
Gladwell calls this an effort that got people on board “by not asking too much of them,” and on one level, that’s correct. It takes minimal effort to click over to a website and type in your address, and not much more to swab your cheek and return the kit they send you.
It’s easy — but most people still don’t bother. Most folks need a goad. And if that’s all this had been, a goad to get people to do something easy and important, it would have been great.
It was quite a bit more than that, though, because actually donating bone marrow isn’t easy. It involves a doctor drilling a hole into your pelvis. It’s usually done under general anesthetic. The pain can persist for several weeks. And in a not-insignificant number of cases, serious complications result.
Yes, of course, it’s easy (or at least easy-ish) get someone to fill out a web form, and yes, of course, online communities do an excellent job encouraging that kind of low-cost “activism.” But as every true activist knows, that first contact with a like-minded soul is the beginning of the process, not the end. And so it turns out that of the thousands of people who joined the registry as a result of this campaign, several hundred have already gone through the real sacrifice of donating marrow. All in hopes of saving a stranger’s life. All as a result of a social media campaign.
And yet this phenomenon is offered as evidence of the triviality of online organizing.
Gladwell is right that strong-tie relationships were a crucial part of the civil rights movement, and is a crucial part of any organizing effort. But he misses the fact that all strong ties start as weak ties, and that even weak-tie relationships can spur action within and between strong-tie communities.
The best internet-age example of this that I know of is one that Gladwell doesn’t mention at all. In 2009, California’s college students were reeling from the effects of state budget cuts. Their tuition had been raised by fifty percent in just two years. Class sizes were growing, course offerings were shrinking, enrollment was being cut. Students were being locked out of courses they needed to graduate. All while administrative expenses continued to mushroom.
So they rebelled.
On the first day of fall classes ten thousand students protested across the University of California. In the weeks that followed, activists sat in. They phone banked. They marched on the state Capitol. They took over campus buildings across the state. Hundreds were arrested, others were tased and pepper-sprayed and beaten.
And students across the country watched from afar. When California activists called a statewide day of action for March 4, 2010, students from across the country embraced the call. Organizing primarily through Twitter, Facebook, and email listserves, activists who had never met face-to-face spread the word.
By March 4 activists on well over a hundred campuses in more than thirty states had been mobilized. They held rallies and teach-ins, marches and panel discussions. For the most part, those events were mounted by students building on prior local strong-tie relationships, but social media was what spurred them to act and co-ordinated their efforts.
The American student movement of the 1960s wasn’t directed by any national body. It wasn’t, in the main, financed or facilitated by pre-existing groups. It was built at the grass roots by students who stood up when they saw their fellow activists on television or in the papers, or received newsletters from national organizations and letters from friends at distant campuses. It was a movement sparked by social networking, and it was a movement that transformed the campus and the nation.
And now, with the help of contemporary social media, a new generation of campus activists is doing it again.
September 30 Update | A participant in an online chat asked Gladwell about my essay yesterday. His response, and my response to his response, can be found here.
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September 28, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Not Necessarily Related to Anonymity But « Digital Culture
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September 28, 2010 at 5:01 pm
chris902
You’re totally right about this, Angus. Gladwell is showing just how little he knows about history. I just wish people would stop paying attention to Gladwell… well really I wish that people would pay attention to the people who say the more intelligent and more accurate things that Gladwell then copies and simplifies and then gets rich re-writing.
I think that there are limits that need to be explored in terms of the power of twitter and other online communications, but Gladwell’s version is too clean and too black and white.
One example from the sixties that scholars have documented very well in terms of SNCC (as well as many other groups) is the role of photography in creating a social movement. Rather than just representing events and movements, images have often been integral to spreading, defining and building movements. It’s not incredibly cheaper to produce and spread images (and even more so video) and while the images alone are not enough to create the kind of commitment necessary for revolutionary change, they do allow for the creation of national and international networks that are can allow activists to feel less alone, spread ideas and encourage each other to mobilize.
A much, much older example that springs to mind is from the first chapter of The Making of the English Working Class. EP Thompson decides to start that book about the creation of the working class and oppositional movements in 18th century England by discussing corresponding societies and the letters that radical democrat artisans wrote to other corresponding societies across England and Europe to build networks and spread ideas. According to Gladwell, these efforts should be insignificant, yet Thompson (and others) have pointed out that this sort of network building was crucial in building a class consciousness.
Dude needs to read some history.
September 28, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Gladwell and strong tie social media networks – The Quaker Ranter
[…] What Malcolm Gladwell Doesn’t Understand About Activism and Social Networks over on StudentActivism.net, via @public_historian. […]
September 29, 2010 at 7:30 pm
N. Jeanne Burns
Other examples Gladwell didn’t consider:
The Underground Railroad and the beginning of the unions in the US. Neither social movement had a hierarchy or structure, though both relied on social networking (without Twitter or facebook mind you…just the face-to-face stuff they did at the time at houses of worship and workplaces and lunch spots) and eventually were successful because of strong ties. But they didn’t START that way.
Yes, Gladwell does need to read some history, and maybe get a chip off his shoulder.
September 29, 2010 at 10:24 pm
Gene Schwartz
Insightful response, Angus.
Not having read his article, but based on your digest, I think his theses about the importance of strong bonds is self evident – but they arent a precondition for movements to arise as you point out. Shared interests or crises lead to common enthusiasms for action and then the bonds develop. That was certainly the case in the founding of NSA – while the Prague delegates in 1946 hard forged a bond by the time of their return, the 400 some college student bodies that were aroused to attend the Chicago Student Congress had no strong bonds and did so purely from the social networking of the time– telephone, snailmail, bus, railroad and hitch-hiking.
A good example today – outside our student realm – were the original Tea Party events.
September 30, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Angus Johnston
This is wonderful stuff. Thank you.
September 30, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Angus Johnston
Yep. There’s a lot I didn’t have room to cover here, and the ways in which weak-tie connections blossom into strong-tie relationships over time is a big example.
I’m planning a follow-up post to deal with some of that stuff. Stay tuned!
September 30, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Angus Johnston
Someone mentioned the Tea Party movement in a comment on the Huffington Post version of this essay — it’s a great example.
Another aspect of NSA history that leapt to my mind when I was reading his piece was the Association’s intervention in the lunch counter sit-ins themselves. NSA officers sent regular news updates by mail to their campus members throughout the spring of 1960, and those updates helped to spark sympathy demonstrations and other actions in support of the movement on campuses around the country.
Thanks for writing. It’s good to hear from you.
October 4, 2010 at 4:09 pm
James Logan
Again you fail to see the point. This is the same point I tried to bring to you the last time I chastised you and your group of feel-good-about-ourselves crowd.
I’ll keep it short and sweet:
What Gladwell is talking about is, its all nice and good to have a website that promotes or educates about sit-ins and stuff; that focuses on how education is wrongly gutted by politicians(mostly Republican mostly Conservative). What is needed is action.
Yes civil-rights had some element of weak-ties, BUT there were more STRONG ties, and that was because it was clear that action, not sit ins were what was needed.
My point is this: That a little over a year after coming across your site(maybe more?) I find myself saying the same thing:
Why the hell are you focusing on the organizing and not on the action? I told you that story about my highschool days where I lost my favorite english teacher because she had one day of tenure…we all ‘sat in’ at a school board meeting…and what did that accomplish? NOTHING. Because what we needed to do was VOTE THE DOUCHES OUT. Toss those Republicans out on their ear.
And yet here you are…again…enjoying the sound of your own voice because you are engaged by a man of monumental intellect who’s nicely taking time out to respond to you and not make you look like a fool. His forte is complimenting critical thinking…yours is to be getting out the vote.
Sitting in WILL NOT DO IT
October 4, 2010 at 4:18 pm
James Logan
(con’t)
Shackling yourself to a shuttered dorm won’t do it.
Running around with bandanas hiding your faces won’t do it.
You want to stop the ruthless gutting of education, then start voting for people who’ll commit to that action. Start coming up with a plan to use the funds if you actually win.
By this time last year, I expected that you would have had a full list of candidates and perhaps a few interviews with them on how they’d repair the system.
Instead I find you and a few friends preening themselves on how they feel they ‘one upped’ one of the greater social observers in our time, instead of realizing that he has deftly ducked your blows to get in close and show you that he is not your enemy…YOU ARE.
You want goading?
Stop preening yourself and self-aggrandizing and get cracking! for crissakes I expect a LITANY of potential candidates(and none of them Tea-bagger either, considering they want to abolish Dept of Education, or do you not know THAT either?)
Go to your room and get it done! the Democratic party is standing right there in front of you with an outstretched hand and all you can think to do is ‘attack’ malcolm gladwell? Gimme a break. You should be crying out long and loud in support of Democratic candidates and putting the active in activism by getting out the vote.
Or must you have your educational institutions disappear completely rather than crumble slowly before your eyes before you get the picture?
October 4, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Angus Johnston
James, I’m a big fan of electoral organizing. I write about electoral politics all the time. But I get the impression that you don’t really understand who I am, or what this blog is.
I’m not a political organizer, and I’m not a student activist. What I am is a historian of student organizing, blogging about student movements past and present. My job isn’t to organize the youth vote for the midterm elections, my job is to write about campus activism. Not just activism I agree with, either.
As for the civil rights movement, your idea that it was focused around “action, not sit-ins” is a little bizarre, given that I was discussing the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960. (The question of whether direct action or electoral organizing is more effective isn’t one that I address in this essay, because it isn’t one that Gladwell addresses in the piece to which I was responding.)
October 5, 2010 at 12:49 am
WayneF
Being a growing fan and proponent of what networking through social media can contribute, I’m not predisposed to giving pause in a dialogue such as this. But I think it’s worth the effort to make the distinction that Gladwell makes, regarding the relative “clout” of social networking.
Drawing any kind of parallel between the very direct risks and dangers faced in the 1960 lunch counter scenario, and the student protests in California, or even the bone marrow donations made – painful yes, still a VERY calculated risk at worst and not meriting the label “sacrifice” – is absurd. It’s typical of the me-centric nature that drives the majority of social networking, to call something like that sacrifice on the same order.
To say that strong-ties started as weak-ties, implying therefore that social networking can lead to those kinds of allegiances – please, WAY too big a leap of faith. Twitter Revolution in Moldova… yeah right.
October 5, 2010 at 8:24 am
Angus Johnston
Wayne, I didn’t draw any parallel between the risks and dangers of the lunch counter sit-ins and the other forms of activism you mentioned — that’s Gladwell’s strawman. As I said explicitly in my post, my intention in bringing up the bone marrow donation example — his own example — was to highlight the weaknesses of his “all-or-nothing approach to the question of whether activism is ‘serious.'”
Most activism doesn’t carry the “risks and dangers” of civil rights work in the American south in the 1960s. But since when do we measure the worth or efficacy of activism by its risks and dangers alone?
As for weak ties growing into strong ties, I personally know several people who have married as a result of “meeting” through online venues. Of course weak ties can mature into the strongest of strong ties. It’s silly to deny it.