meeting in the aisle

Why the revolution might be tweeted in ten years time

After all the buzz on twitter (oh, the irony) this week about Malcolm Gladwell’s NYT piece Why the revolution won’t be tweeted, I finally sat down and read it.

While I have read lots of good posts responding to Gladwell’s position, none seemed to summarise it for me. So here’s my summary for you:

• Gladwell thinks social media is all about weak ties, and real activism, the kind of activism that stopped segregation in America for example, needs strong ties.
• By strong ties he means you have to have a friend involved. If your friend chains themselves to a bulldozer, you’re much more likely to do it yourself
• The problem with social media, he says, is that your online friends are not real friends. You will not chain yourself to a bulldozer for them.
• So while social media might be great for spreading ideas, challenging you, exposing you to new things, and connecting you loosely to a wide number of people, it won’t make you do anything meaningful.
  
  Here’s what I think:
  
• Gladwell misunderstands, or fails to acknowledge, that social media connections can start off loose, but then develop into strong ties both online and in the real world. (I, for one, have meet numerous people in person from twitter, and have developed strong ties with them.)
• Activism, as far as Gladwell is concerned, seems limited to what activism was in the 60’s. He says:

Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

• But I argue that Obama’s election was a form of activism – and most of that started and maintained momentum online. I argue that thousands of people donating money to buy media space for a GetUp! ad is activism. For me, whatever works counts as activism, not whether the activism makes great TV footage.
• While I do agree that social media is not the answer to civil society’s woes - I do think it has a huge role to play in activist movements of all kinds, and is reshaping our very notion of weak and strong ties in the first place.

I wonder if part of Gladwell’s problem is generational? Most older adults I know are generally sceptical of facebook, and scornful of twitter – but their kids are at the other end of the spectrum. They are growing up online, testing the bonds and boundaries of online communications, and have never known a life without the internet or a life where activism means staging a sit-in at a lunch counter in Woolworths.

Gladwell might not see signing an online petition, or tweeting a politician en masse, or signing up to a donor registry as activism, but that doesn’t mean younger generations agree with him.

In sum, I say click that button. Become a fan. Share it with a friend. You just never know, we might end up with equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples after all (or more government support of the Global Health Fund, or protection for Humpback whales in the Kimberley, or….)