Has social media truly impacted activism? This is a question Malcolm Gladwell answers In his article, “Small Changes”. Gladwell pushes back the notion that social media has helped us become better organizers of protests than we’ve been before and that sites such as twitter are accountable for the surges of uprisings we’ve been experiencing. The core of his argument is that internet activism, while having reinvented social activism, is inefficient in regards to challenging the status quo, and I concur.
The article begins with an anecdote, which Malcolm Gladwell consistently returns to discuss. He recounts the beginning of a revolutionary protest, at the Greensboro lunch counter, in the 1960’s; four African American students begin a sit-in,
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At this point in time, racial insubordination was most often met with violence, and numerous people who disagreed with what they were doing came to scare them off, tension grew and the danger was clear, until eventually there was a bomb threat and the store was evacuated. Gladwell then shifts to another anecdote that took place in Mississippi in 1964, where three volunteers were kidnapped, beaten and killed, and during the rest of that summer multiple churches were burned. These two anecdotes of fearless activism lead to the question, what gives people the fortitude needed to go through with such high-risk ordeals? To answer this, he refers to a Stanford sociologist, Doug McAdam, who states that, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t an ideological fervor, like the type that social media causes, that gives fortitude but a “strong tie phenomenon”. Participants of activism are more likely to commit and support a movement if they have close friends who are also in the movement. This leads to Gladwell’s first argument; while social media does cause an upheaval of ideological fervor because there are no strong ties within a group of strangers through the internet, the protest doesn 't have any effect and eventually it dies …show more content…
The civil rights movement was strategically and meticulously planned, from the location to the protestors. Gladwell states that organization such as the N.A.A.C.P. were like a military campaign. When the sit-ins occurred, they didn’t appear in an unmethodical pattern, “It spread to those citied which had… a core of dedicated and trained activist…”. The civil rights movement had a clear leader, Martin Luther King, a clear organization, N.A.A.C.P. and at the center of the movement a black church. Gladwell then refers to Aldon D. Morris who states that each individual had an assigned duty and any conflict was taken up with the minister who had the last say. He refers to all of this to prove one thing, activism is meticulously organized and has a clear hierarchy. This is a stark difference between traditional activism and Social media activism. He states that social media serves as a network and while it is effective in certain areas its not as effective in others, one of them being high-risk life altering activism. He uses car companies as an example of this, while a network is useful in organizing suppliers, its not as useful in designing cars, he states that the reason for this is that when there’s no clear sign of authority consensus and goal setting is almost impossible to reach, which applies to activism. He proceeds to use The Palestine Liberation Organization as an example of
At this point in time, racial insubordination was most often met with violence, and numerous people who disagreed with what they were doing came to scare them off, tension grew and the danger was clear, until eventually there was a bomb threat and the store was evacuated. Gladwell then shifts to another anecdote that took place in Mississippi in 1964, where three volunteers were kidnapped, beaten and killed, and during the rest of that summer multiple churches were burned. These two anecdotes of fearless activism lead to the question, what gives people the fortitude needed to go through with such high-risk ordeals? To answer this, he refers to a Stanford sociologist, Doug McAdam, who states that, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t an ideological fervor, like the type that social media causes, that gives fortitude but a “strong tie phenomenon”. Participants of activism are more likely to commit and support a movement if they have close friends who are also in the movement. This leads to Gladwell’s first argument; while social media does cause an upheaval of ideological fervor because there are no strong ties within a group of strangers through the internet, the protest doesn 't have any effect and eventually it dies …show more content…
The civil rights movement was strategically and meticulously planned, from the location to the protestors. Gladwell states that organization such as the N.A.A.C.P. were like a military campaign. When the sit-ins occurred, they didn’t appear in an unmethodical pattern, “It spread to those citied which had… a core of dedicated and trained activist…”. The civil rights movement had a clear leader, Martin Luther King, a clear organization, N.A.A.C.P. and at the center of the movement a black church. Gladwell then refers to Aldon D. Morris who states that each individual had an assigned duty and any conflict was taken up with the minister who had the last say. He refers to all of this to prove one thing, activism is meticulously organized and has a clear hierarchy. This is a stark difference between traditional activism and Social media activism. He states that social media serves as a network and while it is effective in certain areas its not as effective in others, one of them being high-risk life altering activism. He uses car companies as an example of this, while a network is useful in organizing suppliers, its not as useful in designing cars, he states that the reason for this is that when there’s no clear sign of authority consensus and goal setting is almost impossible to reach, which applies to activism. He proceeds to use The Palestine Liberation Organization as an example of