[LINK] "Why the “how” of social organizing matters and how Gladwell’s latest ... missive falls short

At the interesting blog Technosociology, Zeynep Tufekci doesn't quite fisk Malcolm Gladwell's claims, but comes close enough.

[I]n his earlier piece, Gladwell argued that social media does not support the kind of strong ties which he claimed formed the basis of high-risk tactics such as the lunch-counter sit-ins. Again, leaving aside my disagreements with this claim, it is certainly true that the composition of a movement impacts its nature, and the means of connectivity used in its formation impact its composition. (Let me note the disagreement briefly: my and others’ extensive research on this topic find that while social media do support weaker ties more effectively compared to some earlier forms of communication, this does not appear come at the expense of strong ties. On the contrary, most people use social media to keep strengthen their bonds with strong as well as weak ties and the relationship between the two is not one of opposition but of complementarity and continuum. That is not to say that the rise of social media has not been disruptive at a societal level–rather, the effect is complicated and not the simple one way dilution of strong ties some critics claim.blockquote>

The mechanics of the organizational process have interesting origins and results.

1- Both of these movements have arisen without being directed by a well-defined political party and are not expressed through a well-defined programme. This is both their strength and their weakness. This trend of “non-political” politics precedes the spread of the Internet but has clearly accelerated along with the spread of the Internet and is in direct contrast with social movements of early 20th century.

2- These protests were first kindled through Facebook and other social media which are integrated into rhythms of mundane sociality. This means that rather than being directed at first by a well-defined group of activists who were able to reach only other politically-motivated compatriots, the dissent and the protests propagated through ordinary social networks which, in turn, ensures that the movement is broad-based. Consequently, both the Tunisian and the Egyptian protests have so far been able to avoid balkanization that plagues opposition movements in similar situations.

3- Both movements have so far only been able to express straightforward demands. “Out with the dictator, in with the elections.” (Similarly, other movements of this kind have sprung up in reaction to stolen elections). This is partly because there is no political leadership with whom there could be negotiations, no programme which outlines a list of demands, no spokespeople who can clarify and expand upon issues. While this seems utopian, and certainly has positive sides, it introduces weaknesses–especially by constricting the demands to the absolute minimum common denominator.

[. . .]

4- The specific kind of social-media assisted movements are most likely to erupt in situations where there is already widespread dissent and a fairly-clear problem, i.e. a dictatorship, stolen elections or an authoritarian, corrupt regime like those of Egypt and Tunisia. In other words, social media is best at solving a societal-level prisoner’s dilemma in which there is lack of knowledge about the depth and breadth of the dissent due to censorship and repression and a collective-action barrier due to suppression of political organization.

4- Thus, social media probably has so far been best at triggering a “empire has no clothes” moment. The role such tools play in situations where there is polarization and strong vested-interests on multiple sides remains unclear. In polarized situations, this dynamic might increase polarization through the facilitation of the “dailyme” in which people filter out dissent from their exposure stream and retreat into epistemic enclosures of the like-minded.

What would old-fashioned opposition movements look like? Tufekci makes informed speculations.

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[LINK] "Gladwell Gets It Wrong On Social Media"

Such is the thesis of The Nation's Ari Melber. If I understand Melber correctly, among other things he's accusing Gladwell of moving the goalposts.

Malcolm Gladwell made many waves — and enemies — with his New Yorker essay doubting the power of social media in political organizing. "The revolution will not be tweeted," he declared in October, and the revolutionaries tweeted back, sparking a heated and often predictable debate about the web. Since then, of course, people in the Middle East have been Doing Things that are more significant than anything one might say to rebut skepticism about web activism and "weak ties." On Wednesday, however, Gladwell resurfaced in an apparent response to the idea that digitally networked activists are exceling in Egypt — in contrast to his famous thesis. Gladwell's blog post is brief and thin, but it is also important for the ways he gets Egypt wrong.

The Egyptian protests "look like they might bring down the government," Gladwell notes. "As I wrote last summer[,] 'high risk' social activism requires deep roots and strong ties. But surely the least interesting fact about them 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," he continues, revealing some exasperation before getting historical: "People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone...and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice."

[. . .]

The overarching problem here is the false premise, frequently employed in these disputes. No one is arguing that this is the first protest in world history. Very few people think the Internet is an essential prerequisite to revolution. Instead, they're exploring whether the web and networked communications open up new and effective ways for citizens to converse and organize each other in repressive societies. (Access to mobile phones and text-messaging, for example, may have helped young people organize in Egypt and Tunisia in a different way than landlines or websites.) We can engage these issues without taking anything away from the French Revolution. Now, whether people "always" communicate grievances in authoritarian societies — a dubious claim — is less important to foreign policy than what comes of those communications.

More broadly, Gladwell assumes that asking "why" people "were driven" to these protests is somehow in competition with asking how they achieved such effective protests. Most journalism begins with questions — the questions editors ask reporters, and increasingly the questions audiences ask of the media they consume. We risk large errors when we ask the wrong questions or collapse distinct inquiries. That's especially true for reporting on closed societies. Figuring out whether people are upset enough to protest is one question, which reporters and governments care about, and learning whether those people have the ability to organize protests is another. For Egypt, Gladwell actually has it backwards. It is not a surprise that many Egyptians do not love their dictator — that is not what shocked Washington and the Arab world last week; it is that people managed to plan and execute such a massive public demonstration of that sentiment. So the "how" is more striking than the "why."

Which brings us to another presumption in Gladwell's post: the subjective and potentially indulgent judgment about what is "interesting." Here, I have a little sympathy with his annoyance. Some people are interested in what moves people: first principles and anger points and all that; others are interested in how political action works: collecting petition signatures, party committee elections; and others fixate on technology or media: how an iPhone works, why an article is the most e-mailed. Since the media have more control over public discourse than other groups, by definition, they can skew debates to disproportionately cover their favorite topics, which include itself. This tendency is partially checked by new media, which add criticism and alternative topics to the mix. If there's a blind spot here, however, it is in the areas of media and technology, which are overemphasized by both new and old media. (Pew has data on this trend.)

So while bloggers and the digerati may focus on the new media aspects of Egypt's protests, other people think human rights and the seismic political changes are a bigger deal. The media may also rush to cover visible technology instead of more obscure factors — Evgeny Morozov argues that this happened during the Iranian protests — driving a feedback loop that confuses the public and policymakers alike. So we should be on guard for such dynamics. But when Gladwell simply announces that how people communicate is "less interesting" than why, he's just stating his personal, editorial preference as accepted fact. The banal reality is that different people find different things interesting. And really, by ending his defensive post with that line, Gladwell sounds a bit like the recent Onion headline tweaking his predicament: "Panicked Malcolm Gladwell Realizes Latest Theory Foretells End Of His Popularity."