> That isn't his argument, Julio. His argument
> is that electronic networks are composed of
> what Granovetter called "weak ties" -- great
> for getting a hold of new information that
> nobody near you knows, but not a basis for
> shared sacrifice. That for the latter you
> need strong ties, anchored in face to face
> shared life activities. And that's what you
> need for transformative social movements.
>
> Right or wrong, it isn't a straw man argument
> and it isn't stupid.
Michael:
I'm referring to this brief note on Egypt and Twitter by Malcolm Gladwell:
"Right now there are protests in Egypt that look like they might bring down the government. There are a thousand important things that can be said about their origins and implications: as I wrote last fall in The New Yorker, “high risk” social activism requires deep roots and strong ties. But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years—and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html
Here, I read (or misread), that Facebook, Twitter, etc. didn't really make a difference in Egypt. It's the "least interesting fact." What mattered and matters is what brings people to raise up in the first place. Of course, it's silly to claim that people raise up because of the novelty of social media available or that this wasn't prepared by a myriad previous struggles where people got tested and confident in their own collective strength, all that. The argument IMO is that today's social media are enabling them to raise up, mobilize, organize, coordinate actions, etc. in novel (faster, more economical) ways, which I believe is obvious. And, in that sense, the how has made some difference.
Or maybe I just don't get why Gladwell is so intent in belittling the role of these technologies in today's struggles. What's really the claim? That nowadays we think, do research, read, communicate, interact, and struggle in basically the same ways in which we did all that back when the French or the Russian or the Chinese revolutiont took place? The practical notion that seems to follow from that emphasis is -- what? -- don't use these technologies when organizing with people who share your struggles, Egypt needs no Twitter?! Struggle in the old ways, since what matters is that you struggle even if the methods you use put you at a bigger disadvantage vis-a-vis your enemy? Not sure what to make of his argument. I seem to perceive a straw man involved. (I didn't say it's a stupid argument. Maybe it's just too subtle for me to grasp.)