Annals of Innovation

October 4, 2010 Issue

Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

By Malcolm Gladwell https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-

malcolm-gladwell

•
At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four
college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in
downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North
Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
Social media can’t provide what social change has always required.SEYMOUR CHWAST

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the
waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat
sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for
whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman
who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to
warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t
move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The
four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small
crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the
Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one
of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four
women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men
were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their
schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday,
students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High,
joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday,
the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women,
from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By
Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the
street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a
firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the
wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-

five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that,
students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith
College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at
St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday
and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and
Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga,
Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the
South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first
day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist
Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It
was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand
students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold
thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a
civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it
happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of
social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and
Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political
authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the
powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns.
When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the
spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government,
the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by
which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after
that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the
unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its
Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical
organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations.
“Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and
confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a
former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined
by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors
go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James
K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of
cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. &
T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said,
“give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some
time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’
That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is
now about interactivity and conversation.”
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These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating
whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook
page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter
Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the
most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had
scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter
accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least
because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the
Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by
the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the
protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the
Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations
were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events
in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign
Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The
cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the
role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the
situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother
reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the
English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote.
“Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to
coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than
Farsi.”

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be

solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into
their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The
marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a
false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication
has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days
of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here,
in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the
most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we
seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where

racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four
students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I
suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I
would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day,
the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two
officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up
at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters,
ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku
Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew,
someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be
evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer

Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights
movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited
hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom
Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the
Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an
automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days
of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James
Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and,
during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on
fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten,
shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A
quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges
the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint
of heart.
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What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford

sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts
with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference
wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—
participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed,
articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he
concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal
connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were
required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted
kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely
than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi.
High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades,
the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy
per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the
organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in
Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the
demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall,
are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East
Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a
dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at
the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All
they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in
downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And
the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the
more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely
you were to join the protest.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch
counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph
McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a
roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond
roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain
had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into
the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They
would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the
Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little
Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at
Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil
came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There
was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people
who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or
not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of
coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends
from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all.
The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a
way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have
met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for
keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in
touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook,
as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties,

as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—
not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information.
The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant
connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of
innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up
buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But
weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

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.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking
too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t
really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of
people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy.
You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that
your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few
hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it
doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a
summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require
that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s
the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and
praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they

seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and
that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in
the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in
1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing
motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks
are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of
motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save
Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average
of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has
22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help
Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen
cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition
told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the
advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful
mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their
community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can
measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism
succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by
motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not
motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the
lunch counters of Greensboro.

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of
1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights
movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In
the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities
throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-
rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for
activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held
training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro
Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the
N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the
local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of
sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings
in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro
throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to
those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of
dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially,

strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with
precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization,
run from New York according to highly formalized operating
procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin
Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the
movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points
out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various
standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-
oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,”
Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned
duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who
usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its
online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical
organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks,
which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike
hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled
by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and
the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in
low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an
editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The
effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in
Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be
restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands
spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car
companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of
suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the
articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a
sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t
have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they
have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t
think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How
do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical
direction when everyone has an equal say?

The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the

international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert
Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it
ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of
networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of
rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal
mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside
manipulation and internal strife.”

In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified

and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with
professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were
concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish
central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face
meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police
interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as
decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were
regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their
comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a
unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has
proved far less effective.

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t

interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or
make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re
taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a
hierarchy. 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.” By
the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with
Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a
million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground,
divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into
steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was
maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to
church around the city.

Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the

weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk
strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment
even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation,
the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts
for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in
Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to
communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented
himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy:
think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and
debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had
tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been
steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a
digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of
the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church?
The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—
were things that online social media cannot provide.

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes

Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to
demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the
story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after
she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a
New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on
Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan
discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from
Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back,
she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he
set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had
happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to
their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend,
and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address
online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the
video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan
was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his
readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of
responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the
report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the
case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes,
“and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing
to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was
arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.
Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have
happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have
tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been
publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage
this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone
person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The
story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can
be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.

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.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What
happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters.
But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of
the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping
Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦

Clarification: This piece’s account of the Greensboro sit-in comes from

Miles Wolff’s “Lunch at the Five and Ten” (1970).

Published in the print edition of the October 4, 2010, issue.

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996.
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