Malcolm Gladwell gets it SO WRONG!

I liked Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point.  It has nice gems like "Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place.  It is not.  With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped." (p. 259)

But a few months ago Gladwell wrote a New Yorker magazine article titled "Small Change."  In it he argues that new social media like Facebook and Twitter are not important nor useful for social protest.  These tools provide "weak tie" relations, while Gladwell claims that effective protesters require "strong tie" relationships amongst themselves.  He claims that "weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism."

This is true, I suppose.  But consider the group Project Chanology, which in 2008 chose to protest against the Church of Scientology.  At the first protest, most people there did not even know each other.  In Phoenix, where I protested, many of the people had never seen each other before, and had perhaps only briefly chatted on a chat room, or looked at a web site for times and directions.  Project Chanology came out of the group Anonymous, so it makes perfect sense that these people didn't know each other in real life.  Yet Project Chanology has continued from then until today. You could say these were not just weak ties, they were practically no ties!

Gladwell does say that weak ties are useful; "There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information."

But his main point is that you can't look to new social media as tools for activism.  " In other words, 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 [the civil rights lunch counter protest]."

Well now it's a few months later.  Tunisia and Egypt got rid of their years-long entrenched despots.  And guess what?  They used new social media extensively!  And for that matter, so did Project Chanology, which maybe Gladwell hadn't heard of.  So he got it wrong, horribly wrong.  And now people just make fun of him.  http://www.malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/  I especially like The Tripping Point.