Gladwell vs. Shirky: A Year Later, Scoring the Debate Over Social-Media Revolutions

Now that 2011 is coming to a close, it’s worth looking back at an intellectual argument that played out just as the year was beginning — back before we saw the spread of the Arab Spring, the UK riots, the Occupy movement, and so much else.

In one corner was the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, who argued in an October 2010 piece that the media had oversold Twitter and Facebook as tools for political action. Citing research by Doug McAdam, a Stanford sociologist who studied the biographical patterns in 1960s civil-rights activism, Gladwell emphasized the distinction between “strong-tie” social connections — close, personal relationships of the sort that drew committed activists to protests in the Jim Crow South, despite the risk to their lives — and “weak-tie” ones, the kind of connections you have with acquaintances who might merit your friendship on Facebook, or a follow on Twitter, but not (say) the opportunity to borrow your car. Online social networks, Gladwell argued, were inherently weak-tie affairs, and therefore ill-suited to get people out into the streets.

In the other corner was NYU professor Clay Shirky, whose book Here Comes Everybody had been called out by Gladwell as “the bible of the social-media movement.” Gladwell had pointed to a prominent story in the book about Evan Guttman, a New York banker who helped get his friend’s Sidekick back by shaming the girl who refused to give it up. “A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls,” Gladwell had written. “Viva la revolución.”

A couple of months later, Shirky fired back in Foreign Affairs with a long essay [reg. req.] making the case that electronic media had, in fact, played a crucial role in a number of overseas uprisings: the 2001 impeachment of the Philippine president, South Korean protests against U.S. beef in 2008, the 2009 defeat of the Communist government in Moldova. He granted Gladwell’s point that much of what passes for “activism” online is superficial, like campaigns to “like” various causes on Facebook. But, Shirky argued, “the fact that barely committed actors cannot click their way to a better world does not mean that committed actors cannot use social media effectively.”

In the following issue of Foreign Affairs, the two men had a brief exchange of letters that probably serves as the simplest introduction to their warring points of view. Gladwell:

[J]ust because innovations in communications technology happen does not mean that they matter; or, to put it another way, in order for an innovation to make a real difference, it has to solve a problem that was actually a problem in the first place. … [F]or [Shirky's] argument to be anything close to persuasive, he has to convince readers that in the absence of social media, those uprisings would not have been possible.

Shirky:

I would break Gladwell’s question of whether social media solved a problem that actually needed solving into two parts: Do social media allow insurgents to adopt new strategies? And have those strategies ever been crucial? Here, the historical record of the last decade is unambiguous: yes, and yes.

So Who Won?

So: A year later, whose argument looks better? Certainly, lots of people will be inclined to see the events of 2011 as an outright refutation of the Gladwell camp. As I spell out in my cover story for the January issue of Wired, the year has seen crowd unrest around the globe, with social media playing an organizing role in just about all of it.

But it’s important to take Gladwell seriously on his most important line of questioning: At the end of the day, does the tech really matter? As he somewhat peevishly put it, in a blog post directed at his critics during the height of the Egyptian uprising in February, “surely the least interesting fact about [the Egyptian uprising] is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please.”

And I actually think he’s right.

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Acts of communication, by themselves, aren’t especially interesting. We’ve always had protests, riots, and revolutions, and the people who carried them out have always found ways to spread the word. If the medium for those communications shifts from word of mouth, to printed flier, to telephone, then to texts and Twitter, what does it really matter? Technology becomes an important part of the story only if it’s changing the nature of the events — and the nature of the social groups that are carrying them out.

Fundamentally, Gladwell was correct in his argument that activism requires a lot more than good communication. As he points out, this was the essential finding in Doug McAdam’s study of the civil-rights movement [PDF], which showed that the most important factor in people’s involvement was the strength of their social relationships with other activists. McAdam based his paper on a set of applications that northern college students (most white) submitted to take part in the 1964 “Freedom Summer” campaign. Of the nearly 1,000 applications that were accepted, roughly a quarter of the students dropped out of the program or failed to show up. What, McAdam wondered, was the best predictor of who would stay? The answer, it turned out, was the number and closeness of their interrelationships with one another: the “strength” of their ties.

But it’s worth being specific about how those strong ties manifested themselves. What McAdam zeroed in on was a seemingly innocuous question in the application, one that asked each applicants to “list at least 10 persons whom they wished kept informed of their summer activities.” McAdam suspects that this question was designed to serve as a PR engine, creating a list of influential adults (parents, other family members, family friends) who would become more sympathetic to civil rights through hearing about the activism of a young person they knew so well. And most of the names fell into this category. But the young activists who were most likely to persevere in the cause were ones who broke that pattern to list other young activists like themselves instead (or in addition).

That is: the “strong ties” that McAdam found so predictive weren’t about pre-given connections in people’s lives, such as family ties, or a shared hometown, church, or high school. They were about activists regarding the activist community as their primary community, a set of ties that trumped even their family connections. These activists saw other activists as tantamount to being their next of kin.

Close Connections, Not So Close

It seems to me that 2011 ought to make us believe that the Internet is, in fact, creating and sustaining real strong-tie networks, in just the way that Gladwell seems to think is impossible. Mattathias Schwartz (whose work I’ve had the pleasure to edit at Wired and elsewhere) published a long history of the Occupy movement in the New Yorker, and it neatly shows both sides of the technology question, at least as it pertains to pure communication. On the one hand, Occupy has been a classic viral phenomenon, beginning with an email blast from the editors of Adbusters, and then spreading through Twitter hashtags (and a brilliantly conceived Tumblr). On the other hand, Schwartz’s piece is full of instances where these activists slag on technology or downplay its importance. White, for example, “is not on Facebook, which he calls ‘the commercialization of friendship’ ” and says he “uses e-mail and Twitter only because he feels compelled to.” In the moment when Zuccotti Park is chosen, out of seven possible targets, the advance teams stuck to “low-tech communication methods” — if they’d used SMS or Twitter, one (anonymous) organizer told Schwartz, “it would have been easy for the police to track down who was doing this.”

But what’s most fascinating about the story is the whole range of “close” connections, many of them nontraditional, that conspired to make that movement come together. Begin with Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the two Adbusters editors who came up with the original idea: they’re clearly the closest of collaborators, but they live nearly a thousand miles apart (Lasn in Vancouver, White in Berkeley) and have not seen each other in person for more than four years. Then there’s the countless assortment of preexisting protest groups, all around the country, that decided to lend their support to the project, in some cases traveling thousands of miles to arrive in Zuccotti Park.

From the beginning, the core of the Occupy movement has been the same distributed network of small protest groups that have together for a decade now to disrupt global summits and party conventions. Whether or not they see technology as their primary means of organizing, technology is utterly crucial in the way their whole model works — keeping connected without the benefit (or detriment, as the case may be) of a central authority.

As Shirky puts it, digital networks “do not allow otherwise uncommitted groups to take effective political action. They do, however, allow committed groups to play by new rules.”

To this assessment, I’d add something else: They create new rules for how committed people get and stay connected with one another, and how those connections get classified, even in their own minds. After all, it’s not hard to imagine that, when faced with a questionnaire asking to list their closest friends or associates, these activists would list one another, rather than their family or the people they drink with in their own hometowns.

Activists may need “strong ties” to risk their lives in the streets, but it’s clear those ties can stretch across continents, and can consist entirely of bits — right up until the moment when they come together.

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