Why the revolution will not be tweeted, by Malcolm Gladwell October 4, 2010
In 1960 four African American college students sat down at the segregated lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. The action became part of the growing civil rights movement. Necessarily, it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter. These tools are available now and it is claimed by some that they have had a significant effect from Iran to Moldova. Would the technology have made a significant difference. Gladwell claims that it is one thing to be loosely connected in a network that believes in equality, god mom and apple pie and another, as in Greensboro, where you are required to stand shoulder to shoulder with an exposed, non violent group, about to get its head beat in! You may need a little more than the ethereal connection of ewaves and 500 e-friends to sign up for that one.
Networks are very important and can bring about change and he quotes a report of an example that really inspires:-
In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.Certainly there is a role for the new tools and the new ways of working. Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”, is a very good exposition of that. They are not the panacea for all our ills, and I would accept that I am susceptible to panaceaitis, maybe more that the next person. Where I might differ from Gladwell is that he believes:-
…if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.You have to be well organised and have your members committed but we all know the dangers of hierarchies from churches to political parties.
Commenting on the better known protest:-
The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.”He finishes the article with:-
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.However, consider in turn that if you want to read the truth, write it on a wall. If you want to be free, pull the wall down. But make sure it is not a structural member, it is not of historical or architectural interest, you have planning permission to demolish, you have carried out a risk assessment for the demolition, you have consulted widely on this and genuinely believe that a majority of the relevant population are in favour, that the minority who have fears about the demolition have been reassured, and that it has zero carbon impact and that David and Gideon could find a slot in their very busy diaries if there was a suitable photo op. with the common people, there was provision for drinkie-poos afterwards, no press, and………..
