http://www.hnn.us/articles/132571.html
Is Malcom Gladwell Right That Social Media is Useless for Change?
By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith
Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith helped found Global Labor
Strategies and the Labor Network for Sustainability. They are also
co-authors of "Globalization from Below" and "In the Name of
Democracy." Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on
labor and social history and has received five regional Emmy
awards for documentary films. Smith, former staff on the US House
Banking Committee for Congressman Bernie Sanders, now works as an
oysterman and advocacy journalist.
An article called “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be
tweeted” by Malcolm Gladwell in the October 4, 2010 New Yorker
poses an important question: What, if anything, is the potential
contribution of web-based "social networking" to social movements
and social change? The article’s answer, drawing primarily on an
account of the civil rights movement, is that social movements
that are strong enough to impose change on powerful social forces
require both strong ties among participants and hierarchical
organizations—the opposite of the weak ties and unstructured
equality provided by social networking websites.
Gladwell deserves credit for kicking off a discussion of this
question, but that discussion needs to go far beyond the answers
he provides, both in conceptual clarity and in historical
perspective. This is a modest contribution to that discussion.
For starters, a bit of conceptual clarification. Social
networking websites are not a form of organization at all; they
are a means of communication. Comparing Twitter to the NAACP is
like comparing a telephone to a PTA; they are not the same kind of
thing, they don’t perform the same kind of functions, and
therefore their effectiveness or otherwise simply can’t be compared.
There are other category problems as well. “Small Change”
counterposes "networks" and "hierarchies." It conflates "strong
ties" with “hierarchical” organizations. It denies that strong
ties can occur as part of networks. These three conceptual
presuppositions, which underlie the article’s concrete historical
analysis, deserve some serious reconsideration.
Economists and social scientists have traditionally divided
organizations into "markets" and "hierarchies." Both coordinate
multiple players, but in different ways. Markets are based on
decentralized exchanges that lead to coordination by "feedback"
from past transactions. (People raise or lower their prices based
on how much demand there has been for what they are selling,
leading in theory to the production of the right amount of
different kinds of stuff.) Hierarchies—for example armies and
corporations—are based on a centralized control structure that
plans coordinated activity and then commands subordinates to
implement their assigned pieces of it.
More recently, some interpreters have pointed out that there is a
third form, which they have dubbed "networks." Networks
coordinate by means of the sharing of information and voluntary
mutual adjustment among participants. They are different from
markets because their planning is proactive and based on knowledge
of other participants’ intentions and capabilities, rather than on
feedback from past transactions. They are different from
hierarchies because their decision-making is decentralized and
voluntary rather than centralized and authoritative.
How do the historical experiences of the civil rights movement
analyzed in “Small Change” look in the light of such a clarified
set of categories? There has been a vast amount of historical
research on the history of the civil rights movement over the past
few years. Two points stand out. First, the visible actions like
marches, sit-ins, and bus boycotts rested on a deep foundation of
culture, social linkages, and accumulated experience of struggle
in black communities in the South. These connections, stretching
over generations and diverse spheres of life, were the mulch from
which the civil rights movement emerged—or, perhaps more aptly,
became visible to others on the outside.
These linkages can be appropriately described as local community
networks—means of coordinating action based in information sharing
rather than on either on a market or a command hierarchy.
Far from being able to command the action of these local networks,
national civil rights leaders and organizations were largely
dependent on them. In general, local leaders made the decision of
whether, for example, to bring Martin Luther King, Jr. and the
Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) into town, and they
were generally able to veto strategic decisions they did not agree
with. They used the national leadership and organizations for
their own purposes at least as much as the other way around. This
picture represents anything but a hierarchy in which national
leaders and organizations (or even local ones) were able to
command participation the way it is done in an army, a
corporation, or a similar "hierarchical organization."
Examining the Greensboro, NC lunch counter sit-in that touched off
the sit-down wave of 1960, “Small Change” takes the personal
"strong ties" among the initial Greensboro sit-downers as the key
to their participation. Two were roommates and all had gone to
the same high school, smuggled beer into their dorm room,
remembered the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott,
and Little Rock. They discussed the idea of a Woolworth sit-in
for a month. They were a "product" of the NAACP Youth Council
(although “Small Change” doesn't even mention whether that
organization played a role in the sit-in, let alone organized it.)
They had close ties with the head of the local NAACP chapter.
They had been briefed on previous sit-ins and attended "movement
meetings in activist churches."
What social relations could be less hierarchical than this
description? What could better fit the image of the dense social
networks of a community in struggle? Would the results have been
the same or better had an official of a civil rights organization
come into town and tried to command those four students to go to
Woolworth's and sit in?
“Small Change” similarly argues that such "strong ties" made the
difference between volunteers who did and did not stay with the
Mississippi Freedom Summer. The volunteers who stayed with
Mississippi Freedom Summer "were far more likely than dropouts to
have "close friends who were also going to Mississippi."
Such personal connections are undoubtedly important—but they are
hardly the same thing as a hierarchy. The view that such strong
ties contribute to the emergence of deep commitment is surely not
the same as the claim that hierarchy is necessary to produce such
commitment.
“Small Change” goes on to describe pre-Greensboro sit-ins that
were formally organized by civil rights organizations and
maintains that this argues against a “network” interpretation of
the sit-down movement. But it doesn’t raise the question of why
these more formally organized sit-downs didn't spread and become a
movement in the way that the Greensboro sit-in—initiated by four
high school freshmen who apparently were not even members of any
organization at the time—did.
“Small Change” describes the civil rights movement as "like a
military campaign" that was "mounted with precision and
discipline." Anybody who participated or has reviewed recent
research on its history will likely find this description
unfamiliar to say the least. Some of the SNCC kids from the
Albany, Georgia campaign were even heard to say (perhaps
over-deprecating their own strategic acumen): We had no idea what
we were doing; we just kept jumping around until we landed on
someone's toes and they hollered and that's how we found out who
was really opposing us.
“Small Change” points out that "The NAACP was a centralized
organization." True enough. But the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s came about explicitly as a break with the policies
and domination of the NAACP, an attempt to break out from its
hegemony. And the NAACP had a very ambiguous relationship, to say
the least, to the direct action civil rights movement.
In the SCLC "Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned
authority." Really? Nobody challenged the fact that he was the
leader, but the massively researched biographies of King show that
he was being challenged all the time on strategy and policy both
by his lieutenants and by the local leadership of the movements he
was brought in to "lead." Michael Honey’s magnificent book Going
Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last
Campaign makes clear just how much authority King exercised over
local leaders and other “followers” (authority: none; influence:
even that was pretty marginal a lot of the time).
According to “Small Change,” the “black church” was a hierarchical
organization in which the minister "usually exercised ultimate
authority over the congregation. But there were scores of
different black churches in each city. In any one, the minister
might be able to exercise authority (though if parishioners didn't
like what the minster did they could and did switch to other
churches). But the idea that these churches collectively
represented a unity with a single authority is doubtful.
Certainly it does not gibe well with historical research
portraying the difficulties Martin Luther King, Jr. had holding
together the different Montgomery churches during the bus boycott.
Crucially, did black ministers have enough authority to order
their parishioners to go to jail? Or did the commitment of
movement participants come from something other than a command
hierarchy?
The idea that the civil rights movement as a whole expressed some
kind of unity of command is also dubious. The SCLC was formed
because King was unable to win the black Baptist denominations to
support his vision. SNCC kids derisively referred to Dr. King as
"de Laud." The counter-examples could go on and on.
The capabilities “Small Change” attributes to hierarchies
sometimes reach the level of the awesome. It maintains, for
example that networks are unlike hierarchies in that they are
"prone to conflict and error." Hierarchies are not "prone to
conflict and error?"
“Small Change” points out that digital communication would have
been of no use in Montgomery, Alabama, "a town where 98 per cent
of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at
church." An interesting point. But does that mean that committed
social activism is simply impossible among people who do not have
that kind of pre-existing face-to-face connection? If so, there
must be no examples in which powerful, committed social movements
have developed among people who don’t see each other every weekend
in church.
This brings us back to the role of social media. Gladwell is
surely right when he says social media "are not a natural enemy of
the status quo." But that is only the beginning of the
discussion. The pertinent question is whether social media can
contribute to the process of forming social movements and
effective social action, not whether social media can substitute
for that process. (A telephone system is not a PTA, but it can
sure as heck be useful for getting a few hundred people out to
confront the school board or vote in the school board election.)
The evidence here is pretty clear. Social networking websites can
play and are playing an important role in finding and connecting
people who are beginning to think and feel similar things. They
can help participants deepen their understanding and form common
perspectives. They can help inform those who use them of possible
courses of action.
This doesn't in itself substitute for many of the other things
movements need, and need to do. It does not in itself create the
kinds of "strong ties" that help give a movement strength,
although it may help people find others with whom they want to
develop strong ties. (Compare computer-initiated dating, which in
itself only connects potential partners but in fact has connected
many people who thereupon partnered and married.)
Beyond group formation is the question of power. As Gladwell
indicates, ten thousand people sending each other tweets doth not
a revolution make, or even major social change. Whatever else,
significant social change requires, as Gandhi put it,
“noncooperation” with the status quo and a "matching of forces"
with those who would maintain it. Social networking cannot in
itself provide either of these. But it can be a powerful tool for
making such expressions of power possible.
This is not the first time that the relation between social
movements and new forms of communication has been considered. A
once-influential study published in 1847 observed that workers
were beginning to form “combinations”; to “club together in order
to keep up the rate of wages”; and to found “permanent
associations” to make provision beforehand for occasional revolts.
The consequence was an “expanding union of the workers.”
This union is helped on by the improved means of
communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place
the workers of different localities in contact with one another.
It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the
numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one
national struggle between classes.
Maybe the role of telegraph and newspapers a century and
two-thirds ago is irrelevant to the role of social networking
media today. But maybe not.
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