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"I don't come to refute Gladwell's strawman argument…."
-I've been waiting for someone to take a swing at Malcolm Gladwell's argument about how Twitter… isn't… the Civil Rights Movement? Well here we are, with your host, Anil Dash.
I'm inordinately proud that I read this before it was posted on the Awl.
(It was posted on BoingBoing. Which I follow on twitter.)
Don't talk to me about boingboing, doubleD! I will have none of this!
Funny, I left BB for The Awl. Between Mr. Doctorow's relentless negativity and Mr. Frauenfelder's Ukulele obsession, it was all too much.
'm dsspntd n y Bng Bng
@Mindpowered And their lame love of YA literature! Oh wait…
@awl of you: BoingBoing is the definition of frist pots internet journalism.
Like this guy, I am with Dash's argument until it gets to the Maker Faire point.
On the other hand, I think it's also wrong to hold that because the Maker Faire (or Etsy or whatever "hipster" social media "activism" is the trend today) is overwhelmingly white and middle class, that all online activism is necessarily so. I mean, I know a lot of seriously, systemically disadvantaged people (women, people of colour, people with disabilities, etc) who tweet and blog and tumble as part of their activism. Sure you don't hear about it as much, but that speaks more to the fact that social inequality gets reflected back to you in media narratives about "social media" than it does about what's actually going on on the ground.
To those people, not that I speak for them, but just from several years of reading their work, my impression is that the value of social media was also about just about the plain old personal value of getting to use your voice. Which does seem like something social media (assuming we include blogs) did, in fact, open up for them.
Yup, me too. Sure, it's nice that people are getting together to figure out how to consume less – that's an unqualified good thing. But a revolution it ain't.
Hrmm… his key example is people getting up getting organized, and doing things IRL. So even though he's "arguing" against Gladwell he's agreeing that the real action is offline.
"Best of all, the people who actually make these things happen aren't just sitting around clicking "Like" on things online."
I feel like that's casting Gladwell's thesis too broadly. I'm not sure anyone can refute a tautology, I.e. Real things only happen in the real world.
But Gladwell is further claiming that Twitter/social media can't possibly spur activism because they are too decentralized, in the sense that they can only produce "weak ties" incapable of effecting social change. If you disagree with that claim, you are, in effect, rejecting his argument.
I still think this is a swing, in other words.
Well, people are douches on the net as they wouldn't dare to be to your face. Likewise the activism mainly based on passive actions. No body is going to call you on a twibbon or a retweet as opposed to going out and putting your body on the line.
I think everyone realizes that it's purely numbers, you'll get N people motivated out of X total population, but as Gladwell points out you need that hard organizational structure behind it. Does the web create the ability to have that structure at lower cost? Yes.
But it is not the same as creating real and lasting change through heaping facebook/twitter/blog obloquy on a subject.
The future of social change is consumption.
This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.
Like @Mindpowered mentioned, in the end, Dash is agreeing with Gladwell. So maybe we should keep looking for that "swing."
Dash's article is dressing on a word salad. The symptoms of uplift you get turn out to be gas.
Also, I think many people in Kashmir, Bangladesh, Chhatisgarh, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, etc. would agree that slow and steady wins the race.
Er… "don't think", or I guess you could read it as sarcastic (which really wasn't my intention).
Watch the furious back-pedaling when the next round of Zapatista demonstrations are coordinated through Twitter.
Heh. I was going to mention Chavez's twitter account but I was afraid Jeff Barea freak the fuck out.
When trying to figure out whether the revolution will be televised or tweeted or whatever, you should envisage the process of recruiting the thugs who will help you exterminate millions of clueless, if not innocent, people. Twitter? Yes, Twitter has that potential. Definitely. It's way better than printing Che teeshirts. Assholes.
Twibbons > Che T-Shirts
You know what changes cultures and has a massive impact on people?
This.
Revolutions happen when people get really really really pissed off. Nobody's that pissed yet. Or not here.
I'm with Dash on a lot of this except "when the Tea Party realizes their protest marches will be as ineffective as the even more massive anti-Iraq war rallies were seven years ago." The tea "party" protests and actions have already been far more effective than the anti-Iraq war efforts.
That's because the anti-war protests were done by dirty fucking hippies and the Tea Party is made of honest-to-goodness, real Amurrican salts of the earth. It's obvious which group's opinions need to be addressed and which can be safely ignored.
I am literally, literally quivering with rage by being excluded from the complete dialog by not knowing the particular bloggy jargon meaning of "swing."
But I wanted to leave you "weak tie" people with a little thought: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious-makes you so sick at heart-that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
Yeah, I could use a little "swing" explainer too.
I'm not sure we're even close to knowing yet whether the Web is an instrument of profound social change, the trigger to a zillion tiny movements, or a desensitizing and ultimately isolating mechanism of control.
Or all of the above. After all, it is a web.
Started reading Gladwell's story just this morning. I enjoyed the first part – the "Here's some history you should know" part. Lost interest the moment he switched to talking about how Twitter is not like that. GO BACK TO THE PART ABOUT REAL THINGS THAT HAPPENED.