weak network ties and movement mobilization
Malcolm Gladwell has decided to delve into the waters of social movement theory. In this essay he does a nice job discussing the implications of research on social movement mobilization and networks for the current wave of political activism that some attribute to online social media. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media could revolutionize the ability of activists to organize, some think. They argue that the recent activism in Iran exemplifies the new form of mobilization, as agitators take to the internet to mobilize support for their causes and to coordinate protests in the street. Gladwell is skeptical. Citing research by the likes of Doug McAdam, Aldon Morris, and Mark Granovetter, Gladwell argues that mobilization tends to occur through strong network ties, not through the weak ties of social networking websites. Weak ties are better at transmitting information than they are at getting people to sacrifice and commit to movement causes. The riskier the action or the more commitment required, the more critical strong ties will be to mobilizing activists.
You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry [through social media], 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.
Twitter didn’t create Iran’s Green Revolution. Face-to-face networks were likely the glue that kept the protestors together, especially as the potential costs of protesting increased. However, Twitter mattered in one really important way – it allowed Iranians to communicate messages about their movement to a global audience. This matters because movements create leverage by appealing to third-parties to support their cause and withhold resources from their targets. Like I argued in an earlier blog post about this topic:
Tweeting gives outsiders direct access to the voice of the protestors. Coupled with public protest and an inflammatory situation, tweeting is an audience-creating machine.
Twitter is a broker of many weak ties. It connects a variety of clusters in the global social network, making it possible to communicate rapidly and efficiently to a large number of people. This is why Twitter, and the weak ties it brings with it, is such a valuable asset to social movements. With that one caveat, I think Gladwell seems spot on in his essay.
Written by brayden king
October 6, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Posted in brayden, networks, social movements
15 Responses
Subscribe to comments with RSS.
Comments are closed.
Henry Farrell blogged about this too and Gladwell (or someone under his name) responds in the comments.
Trey
October 6, 2010 at 8:41 pm
Yeah, I think Henry et al. reacted a little too strongly to the piece. It’s not a bad bit of journalistic speculation. He certainly takes existing research into account to arrive at his conclusions. It’s not as if he’s just randomly thrashing about looking for answers. They’re the same sort of conclusions that McAdam and Morris would likely draw.
brayden king
October 6, 2010 at 8:48 pm
Gladwell draws heavily on the Morris analysis of the diffusion of the sit-ins. Yet Andrews and Biggs (2006) find that the sit-ins movement diffused through newspaper coverage, and not primarily through organizations. There is actually a large sociological literature on the diffusion of tactics and contention through various media. Gladwell’s point that new media will not create the strong ties necessary for mobilization is well taken, however that hardly makes the media ineffectual.
Charles Seguin
October 6, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Charles – good point. It’s possible that the new social media will simply make activists more effective in using old media to diffuse their messages broadly. This mechanism of influence is different than the one Gladwell imagines though. Rather than reducing mobilization costs, the new social media may just be better at enhancing the effectiveness of movement’s media relations.
brayden king
October 6, 2010 at 11:36 pm
I also thought CT’s take was overly harsh. I liked Gladwell’s piece for what it was. Micah White wrote a piece on “clicktivism” in the Guardian in August which raised a bunch of the same issues — but without the sociology fly-through.
Social movements are trying to do a bunch of things. This includes diffusing messages widely and eliciting engagement in risky behavior. Gladwell is right to cite the sociology literature on networks and movements that shows how tie strength can be a good way to think about why social media is bad at doing the latter. But it’s important not to undersell the important role that social media can play in doing the former.
Both Twitters boosters and the anti-clicktivists focus on one piece of what movements do. Trying to understand when social media can play a useful role by trying to understanding the limitations of different technologies (through their sociological impact!) seems like a much more productive way to approach the whole conversation.
Benjamin Mako Hill
October 7, 2010 at 12:03 am
I haven’t read the Gladwell piece yet, but from the discussion, it sounds misconceived. In particular, I think that Brayden of 2010 is not giving due to Brayden of 2009, who was building on an orgtheory essay of mine that was recently revised (thanks to Omar!) and published here: http://www.csun.edu/~egodard/asatheory/newsletters/Perspectives-2010-May.pdf. The issue is that the language of strong vs. weak ties misses the potential for a medium like twitter to create *common* knowledge. This is not at all captured in the language of “broker of many weak ties.” (I’d say that twitter is actually not as great at creating common knowledge as is, say, TV in general and the Super Bowl in particular [cf., Michael Chwe on this]). The problem is that there are way too many channels. But insofar as the tweets are visible to anyone who wishes to view them and their popularity can be known, it is much better at fostering common knowledge than is any kind of a network composed of dyadic interactions.) And I’d highly recommend Kane and Park’s 2009 AJS article on the rise of Christianity in Korea (vs. its failure to take off in Japan and China) as the best piece that I know of in the social movements literature to recognize the limits of networks (that are based on dyadic interaction), as engines of mobilization and social change.
(Hmm… too bad orgtheory isn’t like the Super Bowl, in that we can all pretend we didn’t read this or anything else that is written here. If it were, the social movements literature would be forced to confront Kane and Park’s polite but devastating critique.)
ezrazuckerman
October 7, 2010 at 12:42 am
There’s also an interesting clarification by Angus Johnston in “What Malcolm Gladwell Doesn’t Understand About Social Networks”:
“Gladwell is right that strong-tie relationships were a crucial part of the Civil Rights Movement, and is a crucial part of any organizing effort. But he misses the fact that all strong ties start as weak ties, and that even weak-tie relationships can spur action within and between strong-tie communities.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angus-johnston/what-malcolm-gladwell-doe_b_741916.html
david ronfeldt
October 7, 2010 at 1:19 am
Ezra – Good points. The me of 2009 was exactly right, which is why I linked to myself.
Yes, Gladwell misses the point that social media can weakly link together various strongly tied communities and, as I point out in the post, he doesn’t even begin to touch on the potential for social media as a reservoir of common knowledge, which can later be tapped into by the mainstream media and widely disseminated.
But I also think Gladwell derives reasonable implications from those early studies by McAdam, Morris, et al. We have multiple studies showing the importance of strong ties to movement recruitment and many, many more that show that hierarchical organizations drive movement participation. Given all the hype about the power of social media to transform activism, perhaps a little skepticism is warranted (at least until we get more evidence that they work the way the evangelists say they do). At this point, we just need more studies indicating that social media evangelists’ views about the power of Twitter are correct.
brayden king
October 7, 2010 at 1:48 am
Brayden: What tripped me up is your phrase “broker of many weak ties.” I would not use that phrase to characterize twitter’s potential, because it seems to miscast the form of brokerage that is at work. The simple interpretation of your phrase is that twitter is a node that has ongoing interaction with many other nodes, with each of these interactions being completely private. You and I may each interact with such a node but could still think that we are alone in doing so. To get an of “audience,” there must be a sense that we are not alone and that our interaction with the “node” is shared with others.
Charles: Thanks much for the cite to Andrews and Biggs, of which I was not aware. It is very good and though even more polite than Kane and Park, seems to be part of a very productive trend in social movement theory (avoiding selecting on the DV, recognizing the limits of networks).
ezrazuckerman
October 7, 2010 at 6:42 am
There has been a lot of discussion about Gladwell’s claims regarding social media, and I share some of his skepticism. That said, I think there are significant problems with the way he characterizes movements and the civil rights movement, in particular. Gladwell uses analogies like the military and implies that movements have “a single central authority” (because they are not networks). He falls into the common misunderstanding of treating movements like unitary actors that Tilly and many others have cautioned against. One limitation is rooted in the simple dichotomy between networks and hierarchy that obscures as much as it illuminates. For example, SCLC was essentially a network of activist ministers who themselves led hierarchical organizations. The NAACP which was the most hierarchical and bureaucratic played the least instrumental role in initiating protest, and it did not orchestrate mass protest in any meaningful sense. I suspect these insights could be derived from a closer reading of Morris and McAdam and certainly from more recent work.
Thanks to Charles and Ezra for comments on the paper Michael and I wrote!
Andy Andrews
October 7, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I think the limitation of social media for activism is that it can’t move a person very far along the continuum of involvement. A strong tie can take a person with an interest in an issue, bring them to a meeting, and turn them into an involved activist all in one step. A week tie cannot–it has to move bit by bit. It can take the person with an interest and get them to follow a campaign; get someone who is following a campaign to donate $10; get someone who has donated $10 to pass the message to their friends; etc. Perhaps over time, especially where social media ties are superimposed on other sorts of network connections (as in the CA student mobilization example from the Huffington Post article), this can generate sustained involvement in activism. But the comments about Iran around the time of the election seemed to assume that simply by seeing a Tweet about an issue, someone could be turned into a high-risk activist–a proposition that has mislead some into over reliance on social media as an organizing tool.
The research we need is not just on the consequences of social media themselves, but also a continuing focus on micromobilization issues in general. Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, a student working with Bert Klandermans, has been doing some research that will make useful contributions in that direction.
mlarthur
October 7, 2010 at 4:19 pm
I’m intrigued about why the vitriol Gladwell draws seems (to me, anyway) so far out of proportion to his errors. He oversimplifies and gets a number of things wrong, but I’d bet it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overgeneralizations or misstatements in ASR or AJS.
In any case, I share his skepticism about social media (while acknowledging that we do not know for a fact that twitter doesn’t build social movements), but I’d quibble with his point about networks and hierarchy. Networks actually can be quite hierarchically organized, and inequalities in networks are often exacerbated over time.
Bob
October 7, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Factually, I don’t think that Gladwell makes big errors. But I think he builds a bit of a straw-man because he wants to sound like he is overturning conventional wisdom.
In particular, he seems to argue that twitter and facebook are substitutes for other types of activism when you could make a strong case that they each enhance each other.
Michael Bishop
October 8, 2010 at 7:36 pm
The fact that Gladwell attributes this to “the evangelists” instead of specific people suggests to me that few people of any significance believe anything like this.
Michael Bishop
October 8, 2010 at 7:39 pm
[...] argument, if I can paraphrase, was that Twitter and Facebook may be more important in conveying the voice of movement participants to the outside world — becoming an “audience [...]
tunisia: another data point on revolutions « orgtheory.net
January 14, 2011 at 7:16 pm