Online Activism and Offline Activism, Which Is Real?
Article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell
Diffusion and cascading behaviors can be used to explain a wide range of social phenomena we observe today. From how an individual adopts a new technology to the dynamics of online activism movements, the theory of the diffusion model unveils the way our thinking changes with regard to the beliefs of other individuals around us and those within the larger society.
Back in the ages before the existence and the wide dissemination of digital technologies, interpersonal connections were more simple and intimate. Individuals do not have a chance to reconnect over long distances. The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed a time when relationships can only be initiated and fostered through in person interactions. Social activism within these periods happened without email or social network. Gladwell’s article Small Change retells the story of the lunch counter sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960. He talks about how the civil-rights protests there, initiated by four African American students at lunch counters, became quickly disseminated through a densely connected network of student organizers at North Carolina A&T and activists throughout the South.
The movement soon became like a fever, and everyone wanted to go. What Gladwell is presenting here is a successful incident of social activism that sprung from the strong-tie relationships between the students and their close acquaintances. The observability in seeing how other individuals within their strongly-tied networks took part became an effective trigger for people to participate in the activism movement. According to Gladwell, the primary determinant of an individual showing up at the sit-in was the “critical friends”— the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest. This idea of critical friends relates to the threshold diffusion model we’ve discussed in class: When a certain fraction q of your neighbors adopts a certain behavior, in this case participating in the lunch counter sit-ins, you will also follow the adoption. It is the number and degree of intimate personal connections you have within a social network that influences your decisions and behaviors.
Gladwell then moves on to argue how online social networks create a kind of connectedness that remains the opposite of what is required for a real activism that is truly impactful. From his perspective, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are built around weak ties. These platforms are a way to follow people that you may never have met and maintain connections with acquaintances that you would otherwise never be able to stay in touch with. In Gladwell’s beliefs, social networks are only effective in the sense that they decrease the level of motivation that participation requires, but weak ties like these seldom lead to high-risk activism.
Gladwell neglects the role that pre-internet social networks play among individuals. The activist movements weren’t just built around the influence of “critical friends”, it is the collective influence of loose friendship clusters, fraternities and sororities, or even shared meet-up spaces that resulted in this potent diffusion of behavior. This implies how the increased weak ties within social networks increases the rate of diffusion across members of different social groups. In the same way, social media platforms allow individuals to forge and maintain weak ties more easily. The increased number of weak ties between individuals of different social circles facilitates the flow of information across clusters that were originally out of reach. Without these weak ties, social activism never spread across a large network of individuals.
Sources: https://studentactivism.net/2010/09/28/gladwell/
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2010/09/29/130215057/the-revolution-will-not-be-tweeted-unless-it-is