By Doug Pinkham
Public Affairs Council President

September 30, 2010

This has been a rough week for social media. First came the release of "The Social Network," a movie that negatively portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Then Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten wrote a hilarious column about Facebook, calling it "an ocean of banalities shared among persons with lives so empty they echo."

Now best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has questioned the power of social media activism. "The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution," he writes in The New Yorker. "The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns."

Gladwell doesn't agree. Serious activism - the type that produces major change - requires personal commitment, risk-taking and an organizational hierarchy, he argues. Those concepts are foreign to the press-a-button-and-contribute-to-Darfur nature of social media politics.

He points out that the American civil rights movement required well-trained, closely connected protestors who were willing to sit at a Woolworth's lunch counter and stare down an angry crowd. It also produced a well-orchestrated Montgomery bus boycott that lasted a full year because local churches set up a private carpool service.

Social media help people share new ideas and information and build loose networks where decisions are made through consensus. This makes them "resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations." But, says Gladwell, that doesn't give Facebook and Twitter the power to change the world:

It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Gladwell sorts through techno-hype and brings logic to the often emotional discussion of online activism. But it's an overstatement to say that low-risk activities and weak-tie connections won't create change.

That's because when thousands of people join together to protest publicly, they put collective pressure on governments and other powerful institutions. Months or years of this pressure will make a difference - and history proves it.   

Gladwell refers to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but the anti-war movement of that same decade helped to end our engagement in Vietnam. Protests were chaotic and relatively low-risk; they lacked the discipline of civil rights protests. They didn't succeed overnight, but neither did the decades-long effort to integrate schools and lunch counters.

In the world of commerce, grassroots protests have changed forestry practices, curbed the use of child labor, protected wilderness, created a market for "fair trade" products and shed light on unethical business practices. Some of these campaigns were well-organized, but many decentralized ones were still successful because they led to prolonged outrage.

And that's where social media can be so powerful. When the Internet became popular, like-minded people could suddenly find one another and create political movements. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube provide even more tools for organizing people and spreading a message. They don't replace traditional forms of communication; they complement them.

Groups of dedicated activists in countries such as Burma or Iran must still put their lives on the line to change the political order, but now they have millions of people around the world Tweeting about their protests, distributing photos, organizing boycotts and feeding the news cycle. This makes life uncomfortable for totalitarian regimes - and it can eventually lead to reform.

Economist Tyler Cowen, writing for the Marginal Revolution blog, notes there is also merit in loosely connected activism because not every cause requires radical political change:

I believe that "making the existing social order" more efficient, to use Gladwell's phrase, is positively correlated with many desirable reforms, as are the qualities of "resilience" and "adaptability." 

Alexis Madrigal, lead technology writer for TheAtlantic.com, while agreeing with much of Gladwell's analysis, pokes a hole in his argument that networks can't reach consensus and set goals because they are "chronically prone to conflict and error."

This feels thin. Sure, Facebook and Twitter don't have lines of authority per se, but they are not the entire universe of social enterprises online. What about Linux development? Or mathematical problem solving at MathOverflow? Or the Obama campaign's efforts? Or all the little social spaces online where people come together to push for an idea or a project, like Greater Greater Washington?

Gladwell is right that signing an online petition or sending a Tweet is no substitute for personal engagement. He also reminds us that we shouldn't assume every new form of media will be transformative.

Nevertheless, Madrigal says he wouldn't bet against more powerful movements developing through social media during the next decade. Neither would I.

Comments? Email me at http://pac.org/contact/blog.