Motherboard

In the October 4th issue of the New Yorker (the one with a bowl and spoon on the cover) Malcolm Gladwell writes an eloquent 4,450 words on why the ‘Twitter Revolution’ simply, isn’t. It’s a finely crafted article, and it’s very much worth a read, but in a nutshell, Mr. Gladwell’s point is this: real activism takes strong ties, commitment, and organization. Online activism is best at leveraging weak ties, no organization, and a minimum amount of commitment. And because online activism will continue to ask for a minimum of commitment, Mr. Gladwell seems to see it as a petty diversion, not something worth talking about in terms of revolution.

Mr. Gladwell is not a luddite, and he does see value in social media. He says:

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. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous(sic) efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world.
But: “But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.”

To illustrate this point Gladwell looks at the “Help Sameer” campaign, in which strangers were entreated to enter the US Bone Marrow Database to help Sameer Bhatia, a silicon valley entrepreneur, who needed a transplant and couldn’t find a match. Because of the campaign twenty five thousand people signed up, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

Point taken. It’s hard to ask people for major commitments online. But then, it’s also hard to do that offline. If you want to point fingers at general apathy, be my guest, but that’s not a problem inherent in technologically promoted group action.

Where Gladwell does have it unequivocally wrong, though, is in his critique of network organizations. He writes:

Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized.

That might be fine if you’re just putting together a little wiki project, he says. “But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.”

First: Wikipedia might not have captains and lieutenants, but it’s no free for all. We’ve written about the search for a perfect editorial policy before but in a nutshell, of the 13,195,497 registered users, there are 1,758 administrators entrusted with power and tools to wield it.

But that’s really just nitpicking. The real fallacy here is the idea that strict organization and hierarchy are somehow not present in technologically facilitated activist activity. This is just wrong. Maybe not on Facebook, and certainly not on Twitter, but look at the use of networked communication more broadly, and there’s a whole new world.

There’s a word for technologically mediated activism, and it’s “Netwar”. From Wikipedia:

Netwar is a term developed by RAND researchers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt to describe an emergent form of low intensity conflict, crime, and activism waged by social networked actors. Typical netwar actors might include transnational terrorists, criminal organizations, activist groups, and social movements hat employ decentralized, flexible network structures.

A good example of a group making Netwar would be Al-Qaeda, which has maintained itself as an institution by splintering, networking, online recruitment.

Mr. Gladwell sees the use of a decentralized network as a sign of weakness. He writes, “Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.”

This may be true, but Al Qaeda’s flexibility is probably the only reason it still exists at all in the face of a concerted nearly global effort to bring the organization down.

The Global Post has a fascinating roundup of historical protest organizing technology, from smuggled cassettes to a 100 lb. radio that had be be carried around. In conclusion, the authors write:

Historically, new technologies have consistently shaped collective action…More recently, technology has served movements by furthering accountability. “It’s much harder now for police to act horribly because of the threat that somebody will have a cell phone and record it,” Buhle said. Citing past abuses against protesters at political conventions, he said “if these had been recorded and made instantly available on YouTube it might have made a difference.

First world activism is certainly disappointing. The fact that there’s a major outcry every time Facebook launches a redesign, but not, for instance, about the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, is both disconcerting and sad.

But what does Twitter have to do with this? I see Mr. Gladwell’s point, I think, that these are heady days we’re living in (technologically speaking) and it’s easy to start calling something a revolution when it, well, isn’t. Facebook and Twitter are not, in and of themselves, going to overthrow governments and create a new world order.

Social networks are made up of weak ties, sure, ties that might help find a cell phone or even track down the address of a certain puppy throwing girl. But those same networks facilitate the dissemination of information, and they make communication with large groups of people a virtually instant phenomenon. Technology doesn’t start revolutions, but people do. And online networks will damn well help.

More: The Evolution Of The Flashmob, Media Hacking and Digital Actionism, and Our Documentary About NYC Resistor and Real World Hacking.