Malcolm Gladwell has done a hatchet job on Twitter as a social-organizing tool -- but he's gotten it all wrong:
o he's taken too much of his information from Evgeny Morozov (another "mission accomplished" for the cyber-skeptic);
o he's clearly gotten no further information on Moldova from anywhere but Morozov (and possibly Ethan Zuckerman); (he should read my counter arguments on Moldova on Ethan's blog)
o he mismatches his comparisons -- the 1960s civil rights movement is contrasted with the effete snobs sitting ineffectively on Twitter with their "weak ties" -- when the comparison should be to the Iranian Revolution;
o and he shows a lot less familiarity with social movements in general and this technology in particular than anything else he's every written, which always came across as brilliant -- which is why this is a disappointment.
So because he *is* brilliant, I suspect that he will either revise much of these conclusions before the book comes out -- or else dig in and become emotionally invested in being a curmudgeon along with Morozov, and seal the debate over for a long time to come, using the New Yorker mindshare.
No matter. The revolution will be twittered not by him, but without him, then. And...a man who only has a grand total of...eight people (actually news services) that he follows, while having 61,000 followers (!) -- what can he *possibly* understand about Twitter?! [Update: those weren't his verified accounts. He doesn't have one -- CAF.]
I also think, although I don't know enough about Gladwell's background, that he has probably never been in a social movement. You know, carried a sign, demonstrated, marched on Washington, that sort of thing. Like Morozov, it shows; they both share both an excessive idealization of some movements, and an essential scorn for civic movements that don't run the way they think they should -- Gladwell seems completely entranced with the civil rights movement, which is certainly among the best causes Americans have ever fought for, but which is portrayed in a completely hagiographic form as a *form* of activism - and contrasts brave black men and women sitting in at lunch counters where they were barred and suffering beatings and jailings with...the white snobs of today who twitter inanely at their desks or on their expensive phones.It's as if unless you are murdered, you aren't authentic. It's like the way it's so hard to get diplomats to follow Raoul Wallenberg's example...
Of course, our civil rights movement should be compared to the Iranian revolution, or any other movement around the world struggling for rights, and Twitter is merely a tool that happens to appear at the same time as the Iranian revolution. Gladwell wants to tell us Twitter *is* merely a tool, and not a particularly good one, but because he gets so eloquent about contrasting the sufferings and hardships of the civil rights movement with people who only want to click on something today, he can't but help come across as fanatic (as I suspect Morozov is as well underneath at all) -- they are looking for some super people connector that will do it the *right* way yet still leave people available to be beaten up in meatworld -- and Twitter has disappointed.
Again -- I've written extensively, chapter and verse, in reply to Zuckerman's dissing of the Moldovan Twitter Revolution in his blog comments, and gotten only disdain and partial answers from. Frankly, I think my arguments are sound and his are lame here; he can't explain why it is that some twitter revolutions get blessed because he knows the people or likes the lefty cause for political reasons, but others don't, and they happen to be the anti-communist ones. That's not surprising for the lefties of yesteryear or today; they are ambivalent about communism and hate to be hating on it for fear of being branded as intolerant MacArthyites -- or simply uncool -- Zuckerman hastens to point out that *these* commies in Moldova were for economic reform and bank loans lol. Aren't they all?!
Gladwell comes so close to my own preferred theories about different levels of involvement for different types of people that it is frustrating not to see it fully acknowledged by him. That is, when he describes campaigns as working "By not asking too much of them," he can't seem to shed the *judgementalism* in saying that.
But any social movement worth its salt - the successful ones, the ones in for the long hall -- have wide varieties of involvement. You don't have to go on the square and get beaten by the policeman; you can put a candle in your window. You don't have to risk putting a candle where your neighbour might report on you; you can simply donate some food for someone in prison. You don't have to get into contact with dangerous dissidents; you can just read their writings and pass them on. You don't have to get beaten up, you can tweet about it to other people. And so on. These are the hallmarks of all the successful movements that overthrew communism, and while the aftermath is uneven, kept largely peaceful. Movements that are more fierce in their demand for ideological loyalty (the ANC); movements that have tightly-knit cadres that give orders to everyone else who must make great sacrifices -- they may overthrow governments, but they are brittle and they fail (South Africa isn't doing so well re: violence and failure to lift many out of poverty; or look at Kyrgyzstan).
But to have an argument about what kind of social movements work, what makes a good social movement (Poland's Solidarity); why other social movements never seem to get world support (Thailand) -- this is just a different debate. It's related, but it's a debate about human rights, oppressive regimes, politics, the role of the U.S. and the tools are secondary -- or should be.
This is supposed to be a debate about Twitter, however, and here, Malcolm can't seem to accept , like Ethan Zuckerman, that the proof of a Twitter revolution isn't in whether somebody stood in the main square and tweeted to their followers and 100,000 turned up to fill the square and topple the dictator. No, Twitter revolutions area about spreading the word, getting people engaged, getting particularly diaspora or foreigners to care and simply keeping the issue in view. That was the aspect of the Iranian Twitter revolution that the current debunkers can't or won't acknowledge, but it's vital for creating a milieu that keeps the attention going on a country after CNN goes home, after having arrived late.
AFTER TWITTER -- FREE KYRYGZSTAN?
To hear Morozov and Gladwell tell it, you would think nobody watches #freekg (furiously debunked by Morozov and others) anymore. But in fact, the record shows that its membership has only grown. Many people keep adding to Twitter from Kyrgyzstan -- I'm drowning in offers of them and have followed a lot of them. Nobody claims that the unrest in Kyrgyzstan is pretty; it isn't a *good* Twitter revolution when, as a blogger put it, those sure ain't tulips growing out of those bazookas. Even so, it's a social phenomenon when a large part of the rolling event *is* on Twitter, especially for those in the neighbouring countries and abroad.
Twitter is a fact of life; Kyrgyz government officials, including Roza Otunbayeva, the interim president, have made accounts and use them, although not steadily.
Twitter is, after all, just a news feed of links. Some of the links go to more important sources of information like 24.kg. But if you can't muster the stamina to read the voluminous amount of stories on 24.kg or Diesel, a popular Kyrgyz forum, then Twitter, with its hashtag and friend following function that lets you pick out the smarter or less noisier and more signaly people is a great tool. As is Facebook, used as a news feed. A good chunk of the news that fed blogs and mainstream media during the June pogroms in the Osh region *was indeed on Twitter*. In fact, it's a Marxist social movement fetish to insist that we only review Twitter's efficacy by analyzing whether it rouses masses of people to...something. Instead, we should ask how Twitter affects *any* incident or phenomenon -- Obama's campaign; the Moscow metro bombing; the Haiti earthquake; the Pakistan floods -- we should ask how twitter is used by people in situations like these, not just ask whether they marched on a square to topple a dictator. Revolutions do not only happen on squares, and are not only about toppling dictators.
NETWORK OR HIEARCHY?
Another thing that Gladwell gets very wrong, in my view, is his notion of hierarchies and networks. He characterizes Palestinian terrorists as a "network" -- as if he almost can't help admiring their modernistic lightness and flexibility and "everywhere at once" quality. I'm not an expert on terrorism, but this strikes me as odd; it strikes me as a fundamental error with the difference between networked and networking.
Terrorist organizations have charismatic authoritarian leaders and followers who are abjectly loyal. Indeed, Gladwell describes the German forms of terrorist groups as exactly this way, so it's a puzzle why he can think the PLO has "absence of central authority" and "the unchecked autonomy of rival groups" as if they are special. That is, he thinks that because he's citing some experts, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones who argue this in a recent essay in International Security. So what? Some other experts surely would be found with a different view. This is one of the weak points of this essay unlike other works of Gladwell's where you sense he has done his own very original thinking and testing of hypotheses. This was just cut and pasted.
While they have cells and franchises of freelancers, as we are constantly told, there is every reason to believe such terrorist entities, too, run on a principle of tribal subserviance to a powerful tribal leader -- it's merely that the followers, once indoctrinated and trusted, are able to be sent out on missions. The potential for retaliation against them by their comrades if they fail or diverge from the path might keep them consistent. If there isn't a formal organizational structure, the ideology piece of it is terribly formal and hierarchical -- here there is always some mullah or teacher that is the guiding inspiration for the ideology of the movement. Just because terrorism is dispersed doesn't mean it's a "network," i.e. open and flexible and free. If it were -- there'd be less of it. Why? Because there'd be more actual ideological diversity even among these fanatics; they might be subject to reason or debate or persuasion. Yet what binds them isn't media or networks, but belief, and that belief starts with some life-changing experience of a leader.
TWITTER IS JUST TRIBES
Gladwell, unconsciously like the social media hypesters themselves, seems to think that just because somebody or some group is on Twitter, that they are flexible and free and innovative and hyper-modern as a type of structure. But that's silly. The phenomenon on Twitter replicates the oldest human structures in history -- the tribe with the powerful or charismatic leader and his far lesser followers who slavishly obey. A perfect case is Scoble. He has masses of followers who listen to him all the time and retweet him dutifully *and never talk back*.
Has Gladwell ever stared for any length of time into the maw of the Twitter hashtag search? It's totally scary. Pick any famous name, take @aplusk or @ajkeen or @clayshirky. Enormous numbers of people are merely copying and pasting what they say. They aren't even adding a thought like "interesting, but I don't fully agree". They are salivating like Pavlov's dog and "liking" and "RT"ing. Millions. On hastags. Go look. It's awful. Almost nobody talks back. Very few, like me, do. When we do, and we do it with someone like Mike Arrington, we are blocked. I've been blocked and unblocked by Arrington; so have a few Second Life friends. These Twitter leaders are very aggressive, but have very fragile egos and thin skins when it comes to criticism of them and their ideas. Twitter is a very emotional place. McLuhan would call it "hot media" like radio and not "cold media" like TV.
MOVEON.ORG AND WEAK VS. STRONG TIES
Why does Gladwell go to such great lengths to set up the idealistic model of the civil rights movement? Because he wants to prove that the authentic and successful model of a social movement is real people doing real things and networking through face-to-face close connections of loyal friendship tested in the line of fire -- and portray online networking as shallow, glib, unsuccessful, and even fraudulent.
This is a beginner's mistake -- and we are all beginners at this, really. I remember how Todd Gitlin denounced me for running a campaign via email in support of the famous moveon.org campaign against Clinton's impeachment. This lefty social movement guru thought it was terribly unauthentic back then in the early days of email to click and send around emails. He thought it would never work, and we were lazy for not picking up phones to call our congressmen.
But moveon.org went on to become wildly successful not only because its backers were wealthy Silicon Valley ideologues with a zealous mission, but because people liked clicking, and it worked to create an environment where more press and more phone calls happened. To imagine moveon.org, which had a powerful effect in getting Obama elected, as shallow and unsuccessful would be erroneous. It isn't the *only* factor, but it's a big one, especially because in fact it's *not* a network, but a very rigidly run, top-down organization where a few people decide the ideological message, make the YouTubes, and get the others to go along. I don't care for moveon.org not only because of its extreme politics but because it isn't really social media in my view, and not open -- there is no forums but only messages that "journalists" are supposed to imbibe and regurgitate. Even so, moveon.org's campaigns on certain issues have to be acknowledged as having an effect; the anti-impeachment movement was one of them.
WHEN ONLINE CAMPAIGNS WORK
I personally can cite a number of cases where in fact email and Twitter and online petitioning worked, in ways that Gladwell doesn't seem to think it can:
o Whoever heard of Yuri Samodurov beyond a small circle of friends of Sakharov and Russian emigres? But these people got the word out about his trial for an art exhibit that criticized the Russian Orthodox Church, emailing and Facebooking and blogging -- and yes tweeting --and ultimately an organization called Human Rights First made a petition, and got more than a thousand signatures, many of them prominent, and got the news media to cover Yuri's trial. It was among the factors that got him a fine instead of 3 years of jail
o Andrei Zatoka, a Russian environmentalist in Turkmenistan who had been long harassed by the authorities was suddenly arrested in a ridiculously trumped up incident and immediately sentenced -- an outrage that might never have been heard given the closed nature of the society unless a network of people began emailing and tweeting and signing online petitions (these things all go together). He was let go, but forced to emigrate to Russia -- a fate certainly better than jail. Hundreds of environmentalists spoke up on his behalf -- *online*. One of the things they did was write the Russian and Turkmen presidents *on their websites*.
o The American tech delegation to Russia was carefully scripted by Jared Cohen and other American and Russian handlers. But thanks to Twitter and Live Journal, the script that was supposed to provide the soft touch that the U.S. wanted to give on the Russian reset was disrupted, and students in the Novosobirsk university locked out of the meeting with the Americans because they hadn't been selected by cautious Russian professors were able to be invited into the meeting by Ashton Kutcher who followed the twitter stream and saw the students' complaints.
These are little breakthrough moments, and I don't pretend they "save humanity" or win the revolution in Iran, which will remain a protracted struggle for some time to come. But they help. They are more accelerated than magazines or fax, involving more people. That's all a good thing.
THERE WERE NEVER ANY 'FAX SKEPTICS'
The examples I give could be replicated numerous times on individual cases; on legislation; on getting accurate news out during times of unrest and disaster. Nobody questioned the telephone or the fax like this -- and the fax I can remember distinctly as it entered our world and became ubiquitous. Nobody wrote diatribes denouncing the Fax Revolution hype. Nobody said the fax wasn't *really* helping to break the wall of censorship in the falling Soviet block (it was). Nobody questioned it's obvious use. In fact, the Genocide Fax story (the news of the Rwanda genocide ignored by the UN) was the quintissential story that told us that technology isn't the problem; people are the problem. But nobody became a Fax Skeptic or a Fax Curmudgeon due to the Genocide Fax; if anything, they tried to fax *more*.
As for "weak ties," that's one of those social media guru or Silicon Valley platform entrepreneur jargonistic phrases, whatever its social sciences origins, that hardly describes the reality of our days. There are people I've never met from Second Life, Facebook or Twitter who I have debated strenuously, or from whom I have learned, or who have become regular friendS, and they are no weaker than the weakly-tied actual neighbours I have in my real-life huge apartment complex in Manhattan, where we know our neighbours more than most buildings, but where we really know them very superficially.
We make new friends and families and communities online nowadays, and these aren't weak; they're just different. I can't help thinking that this is a cultural issue of direct experience. Someone like Gladwell goes to an old-fashioned magazine with writers and editors in offices every day, or goes on the lecture circuit talking to people or speaks at conferences. So for him, these situations are real, and perhaps Twitter feels less so. But multitudes of people have moved online, and on to their phones. This isnt just rich people; this is millions of poor people -- countries in the third world, in Eurasia, are skipping over the Internet stage and getting mobile phones that access the web; when the Kyrgyz refugees came tumbling through the barbed wire on the border of Uzbekistan, with nothing but the shirt on their backs, they were clutching cell phones with pictures of the atrocities that they were sending out with SMS messages. Many, many people are online or on their phones, they aren't at the lunch counter. That is their life, for better or worse. You will not be making them go back.
THE WHITE ASS
But Gladwell trivializes and disdains the masses going online and on their cells by citing only one tendentious example of a white, affluent man who lost his phone, which was stolen by a black woman. Shirky had given us this example exhuberantly as part of the new crowdsourced, networked, always-on, cognitive surplussed Big Brain that he would like to take credit for and run.
The big hole in the story of crowdiness, however, is how the first clue came -- not through crowdsourcing or ecstatic networking, althoug still from technology -- the technology of surveillance by companies, scraping all our data. Clay and Malcom both are silent on this aspect.
This white dude's girlfriend left her cell phone, a Sidekick in a taxi, and then the phone company *transferred all her data to a new phone*. That enabled her to see that a teenager was now taking photographs with the stolen one. No crowds there; just a phone company backing up data and the trace of its use visible to the rightful owner. So now, the white dude emails the black girl -- but she says his "white ass" doesn't deserve to get it back. That set him on a path of revenge, and the rest is history. Eventually they got the police to pay attention and retrieve the phone. It wasn't the crowd that ever got involved, hunting around among their friends to see who had a stolen phone matching the description. That's why this is so totally false, and Gladwell should have caught it.
The police, armed with the woman's identification from the phone company merely needed persuading to go get her. They didn't want to bother, so *here* is where the crowd came in -- in bombarding the police with messages to do the right thing. The crowd was galvanized by Evan functioning as a vigilante -- which is why this is such a nasty story -- once they had a name and a place, they found a Myspace; then they found a boyfriend and her address and then videotaped the black girl like a bunch of 4-channers, then posted it on line, and began to agitate. "By this point millions of readers were watching," says Shirky, "and dozens of mainstream newsoutlets had covered the story" -- as if it's a good thing to accomplish justice in this outrageously aggressive vigilante manner. No matter. What matters is the girl is to be hated and the Sidekick, that totemic symbol of the wired world, is to be retrieved.
ADAPTABLE DOESN'T MEAN #FAIL
Reflecting on this, Gladwell says:
Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. 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.
This is a powerfully destructive paragraph designed to torpedo most enthusiastic civic movements today -- for what motive, I'm not sure. But it's morally wrong. There isn't a false choice between "strategic/disciplined = successful" and "resilience/adaptability = failure, or less successful" -- for one thing. People fighting oppressive governments face ever new forms of torture and imprisonment. In today's Russia, the crime, the danger, the targeted killings -- these are all so metasticized now that it is folly to take the government head-on except in the capital, where publicity from foreign newspapers, and the presence of foreign diplomats, mitigates the oppression some what. So most people can only go on email, Live Journal, twitter, and socializing sites like agentura.ru and the new Russian Facebook or Vkontakte because *that's what is doable*. And that's where they hope to debate and gradually change minds. It's like the way Czech dissidents mainly had to write novels and essays for decades while a handful of the bravest went to jail. We live in an era where facing down murderous regimes that sponsor terrorism -- like Iran -- is terribly dangerous and even foolish. But Twitter appeared to ease this plight, thankfully. Be grateful for it, rather than resentful that it doesn't work like the civil rights movement worked in a country already under the rule of law.
SAVING DARFUR
Twitter is still a new muscle that people are flexing. They flex it badly and wildly on things like #amazonfail, remember, when there was a rush to judgement on partial information about whether Amazon was censoring LGBT books out of its search, and then a backtracking by Amazon ultimately to fix the optics of the situation because of the Twitter uproar. Imagine if people did this on Sudan -- but by facing the right targets.
The Save Darfur movement has enormous visibility and participation -- it is the largest mass movement in America since the peace movement in the 1980s, and far larger than the anti-apartheid movement -- but more shallow, and with little effect. That's not because of Twitter -- and that's where Gladwell has to have a debate about social movements in general, and not just Twitter.
In my view, the Save Darfur movement fails to mitigate the suffering of Darfurians or topple the evil Sudanese regime for a simple reason of leftist social movement myopia (although the movement has conservatives and religious believers, it follows the patterns and targets laid out for many decades by leftist movements): because it targets the U.S. leadership, and they are only tangentially relevant.
It's China that does business with Sudan; it's Russia that sells arms; the U.S. only rings its hands and gets some Al Qaeda intelligence out of some listening posts, and the EU only has workshops. Mass citizens' movements of the sort that buy t-shirts about Darfur or see ads on bus shelters or send in $20 should be turning towards China, Russia, the African Union, Egypt, which consistenly side with Sudan's murderous rules. But they don't. Because such targets are almost never selected by lefty and "progressive" movements, which prefer to guilt-trip affluent kids like Evan into thinking their "blood phones" are responsible for deaths in the Congo, instead of calling to account a dozen kleptocratic African rulers and OIC members selling arms -- because they're not open societies, and their rulers are impervious -- or so it seems -- to citizens' movements.
Of course, few people have tried. A movement where Save Darfur activists contacted every single Chinese person they could reach, especially organizations like Chinese Student Unions or professors or businessmen and demanded that they reach their government and do something about affecting Sudan -- how would that work? The backlash and the static would be beyond Twitter. But it would be a start toward grasping the nettle of where citizens' work has to go on these kinds of issues not all solveable in or by America. When people realize they can't do an email campaign to the African Union because they put its server out of business within a day -- or can't do an email campaign to China because there is no email address for the Chinese missions; then they start looking at other connections, other ways, to achieve the same thing through other routes -- yet still involving twitter and email.
There are big things still to be done on social media like Twitter and Facebook and they will be done. The scary part is that men like Zuckerberg have their own very narrow and Silicon-Valley parochial idea of what this should be, as I've explained on the model of the Columbia story. But tools are just tools. People will emerge to use them, and they will be used. The skepticism and quietism induced by Morozov -- and now Gladwell -- won't be a deterrent.In fact, I think it's safe to say that neither of these armchair pundits will be leaving their desks to go out on the street and face a policeman's club over a cause of any sort any time soon, so their goading of the rest of us because we tweet and don't fall under the club ourselves is pretty lame.
BEL R US
A friend of ours, the journalist Oleg Bebenin who ran charter97.org, has been found hanged in Minsk. His colleagues believe he has been murdered by forces close to the regime or within it on the eve of contested presidential elections in which he was involved. Since getting the awful news, we have been emailing and blogging and tweeting and petitioning various authorities, and some of them -- aided by the fact that they could see this news emerging in both mainstream media and social media -- have been speaking out and demanding accountability. It will be a long haul. These things are not able to be measured. But in fact tweet by tweet, it is being accomplished. How else could it be, with a place like Belarus few people care about?
Meanwhile, Morozov's contribution to his homeland is to tweet a joke about laughing at the dictator president who refuses to start a blog, saying how in Belarus, "the blog writes you."
No, we write the blogs, and will go on writing them despite these really strange and even unseemly attacks on civic activism that these supposed concerned citizens should respect. That they feel the urgent need to debunk and discredit likely means they fear the undermining of their own power by it. Mind you, I totally "get it" that Gladwell is talking about *relative strengths* of one kind of movement or form over another in this piece. Even so, I think we call feel the judgement: black civil rights leader=good; white anti-communist Moldovans=bad -- though Moldovans got beaten up, too.
Does Gladwell realize there are no more lunch counters to sit on? They disappeared from Neisner's and Woolworth's -- which itself disappeared! -- years ago. A few K-marts still have them, but it's different now. Where do people meet and where do they take their stand? Not at a lunch counter, but likely online.
ANTI-NUCLEAR MOVEMENT
I'll take a movement less far back than the 1960s, when I was only a teenager, to the 1980s. The "freeze" and antinuclear movements had many different levels. Some women were camping out literally at Greenham Commons in the United Kingdom to protest missiles at an army base. Others were sitting in an institution lecture hall in Massachusetts listening to Randy Forsberg discuss throw-weights. Maybe someone would march in a big demonstration, but somebody else might only cook dinner for the people who came to a living room political debate (there used to be more of those in those days).
The marches were possible, again, because there was a lot of that connective tissue. I remember in those days, driving or taking the bus to various meetings up and down the East Coast, feeling as if the whole Coast was alive with people debating these issues, which of course were aided by mass phenomenon like Jonathan Schell writing about nuclear winter in the New Yorker. There was a time when just about every single intellectual in America was gripping those issues of the New Yorker and taking a position on them.
How diminished is the influence of the New Yorker by contrast today!
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