Gladwell Gets It Wrong – Again

Malcolm Gladwell has done it again. Last summer he wrote, I thought rather flippantly, about the ineffectiveness of social media in generating and sustaining social protests.

And now he has followed with a post on the New Yorker blog. (An irony-free zone for Gladwell who apparently doesn’t believe that this blog is a social media tool, and for him it isn’t as he appears to pay no mind to the comments.) He writes, “People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.”

Of course they did. We had a revolution in 1776 that wasn’t tweeted, pinged or posted. It doesn’t mean that the same recipe for organizing and sustaining the protests, and sharing them with the world, is the same as it was a decade or a century or two centuries ago.

The advent of social media provides three critical resources for protesters today:

1. The ability to initially organize as the Egyptian protesters did on Facebook and Twitter to connect with their friends, but more importantly, the friends of friends, the network. It was difficult to do this previusly, but not impossible of course, because of the time and mistakes that happen with telephone trees, the expensive and danger of advertising and danger of organizing on-the-ground meetings.
2. The power to change plans in midstream. Using tools like text messaging, Twitter or Foursquare protesters can change meeting places or times in real time, moving thousands of people at a moment’s notice.
3. Finally, social media enables citizens to share their stories, pictures and videos with the rest of the world. This gives voice to the previously voiceless and puts pressure on other governments to support legitimate protests.

As I wrote the other day, the only drawback to a reliance on social media at this time is the ability of governments, including ours that pressured companies to deny service to Wikileaks recently, to shut down service and cause a blackout for social media users in country and out. As we’re seeing in Egypt, resourceful individuals, citizens, reporters (see Nick Kristof’s powerful tweets here), news agencies, are finding a way to share the news of what’s happening in Egypt and around the world.

Social media aren’t causing revolutions, they are aiding them. Gladwell can sarcastically imagine Mao using Twitter while missing the point entirely that Mao never needed a vehicle or a voice, but the people of China certainly do. We will never know how the protests in Tiananmen Square might have been different with social media, but we’re seeing in Egypt the power that side-to-side communications can have in starting and stirring protests.

Lessons and Thoughts on the Egyptian Protest

I’ve been watching and reading about the protests in Egypt with awe at the courage of the participants and fear for the reprisals they may face. Perhaps it’s too early or easy to generalize, but that’s never stopped me before! Here are a few thoughts about the Egyptian protests, and what makes it similar and dissimilar to recent protests in Yemen, Tunisia and Iran:

• Are heroic leaders always necessary for overthrowing dictatorships?  The protests appear to start in similar fashion. A long-simmering unhappiness, catalyzed by an economic or political event that is spread and catalyzed side-to-side in part because of social media, particular text messaging, that spills out into the streets. This progression mirrors those from twenty five years ago in Eastern Europe. However, one drawback to the  lack of an opposition party, is that it is unclear to whom the protesters expect power be handed to. Lech Walesa, Vaclev Havel, Nelson Mandela personified their country’s opposition forces. And, in the Nobel Prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, it appears the country now has it’s heroic leader. No clear leader emerged in Iran and the protests were beaten back. Is a heroic figure an essential ingredient to success?
• How valuable can social media ultimately be for social change if access is to easily denied? What is different about these protests from those a quarter century ago is how easily and quickly the protests can grow and spread because of social media, But just as easily as social media can be a catalyst for spreading protests, the access to social media can be cut off instantly and without explanation or recourse. This applies not only to the protests, but also to the recent skirmish Wikileaks had with American companies trying to cut off its Internet access. Although the Pew Center for American Life and the Internet now considers online social networking tools, “standard tools for political engagement,” they are also easily blocked by countries or companies. We do not have open, unfettered access to the Internet here or abroad, and these recent events should support the argument that access to the Internet is a fundamental right not a privilege. It should — but, sadly, it won’t because the corporate world has a stranglehold on the democracies, and the dictatorships control the rest. If you want to be scared about the stranglehold that the telecoms have on politics and the Internet here watch Susan Crawford talk about it here
• I wonder if there are common characteristics to the protests, protesters, countries, circumstances, dictators that make the overthrow of a dictatorship possible in some places and impossible in others? Can anyone point me to any studies on this?

It’s a fast changing world in some ways, but some things remain stubbornly the same. The desire of people to be free is certainly something that has never, and will never, change or dimish.