Malcolm Gladwell

Author of four best-selling books, Malcolm Gladwell (b. 1963) grew up in Ontario,
Canada, the son of an English university professor father and a Jamaican therapist
mother. He has been a staff writer with the New Yorker magazine since 1996, and
in 2005 he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. His
books include The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000),
Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005), and Outliers: The Story of
Success (2008). Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw (2009) is a compilation of articles
published in the New Yorker. His writing often explores the implications of research
in the social sciences and psychology.

Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

The following article, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2010, compares the
intricate network of activists who brought about the civil rights movement with the
social media networks that have sprung up on the Internet.

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.

“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 teenagers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A.

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

& 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.”

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

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter has 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

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

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.

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 percent 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 percent 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.

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

 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 marvelous 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

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

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 preexisting “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

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

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

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

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 smartphone, 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 teenager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that
his “white [self]” 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.

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366

 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 his story of the 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 teenage girls. Viva la revolución.

(2010)

Excerpt taken from Conversations in American Literature textbook, page 1357-1366