On Sun, 13 Feb 2011, Julio Huato wrote:
> He's probably right about the dominant use of Facebook, and not only
> in the U.S. Yes, in most cases, the ties that bind people on Facebook
> and Twitter may be weak. But he did miss (1) that they are not
> necessarily getting weaker because of Facebook and Twitter, and (2)
> the story of how people with strong ties and deep reasons to struggle
> could use (and were already using!) the technologies.
I don't think he's missing that. In the end it seems like you guys are agreeing: social media are means for social movements to use just as social movement have always used media. They aren't fundamentally different. If you've got a social movement out there -- like a labor movement -- then by all means, use this stuff.
What Gladwell's argument is -- and I am trying to refine it down to his best case, so this may be better than the original -- is something like this:
1) What makes social media like Facebook different than previous media like radio is that they create virtual communities. People share daily routines for lots of hours every day. They share personal information. They talk to each other and learn from each other. They "neighbor" as it used to be called. The only difference between these communities and all previous communities in history is that they are missing the face to face component.
2) People can certainly make virtual friends this way that have large impacts on their emotional life and sense of self and even direction in life. Gladwell's question is whether these kind of communities can be the basis for collective political action. And his answer, for various reasons, is No -- that their collective political action will necessarily be virtual, just like the rest of their social relations.
3) Gladwell is in effect arguing that political movements that change anything have to be based on real communities -- unions, parties, anything where people meet face to face. When you say that the point is that such groups can use this new stuff to be more effective, you seem to be implicitly agreeing with him.
4) But Egypt may in fact show an example where this is not the case. Much of the recent uprising was and is based in real (i.e., face to face, bodily presence) communities -- parties, unions, the brotherhood -- and I think it's indisputable that without the participation of those real communities, it wouldn't have happened on anything like this scale. But the last 6 years in Egypt seem to give examples of virtual communities of the type described in (1) that were the basis of serious collective political action -- serious as a beating. And that their political actions played a crucial role in politics that had a big effect. Which seems to disprove Gladwell's thesis.
Michael