Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker piece: Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted is being hailed as “a stinging takedown of social networks as vehicles for meaningful political and social action” (Frank Rich, NYT).

While social media is undeniably over-hyped these days, and many of the Green Revolution tweets in Iran may have been in English (not Farsi) and originated outside of Iran, Gladwell’s conclusions are based on faulty logic and not backed up by any substantial evidence.

Gladwell compares select anecdotes of social media activism to the lunch counter sit-in at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 – a watershed moment in the civil rights movement – as a rhetorical device to conclude that advancing real social change requires strong ties to confront the entrenched social order because this necessarily engenders extreme sacrifice and severe danger (there were many lynched and murdered civil rights advocates). Since social networks promote weak ties, and facilitate only easy actions (liking, sharing, tweeting, and even online donations) they take energy away from potential, yet real movements.

The piece fails to prove these assumptions. More importantly,  it trivializes (in a very mean spirited way) the actual social good that is being done online today. Gladwell is largely comparing apples to ipads . I.e., just because we are not faced with the codified racial discrimination of Jim Crow today, does this mean that people should not sign up for “donor registries” in silicon valley or like or even donate to Save Darfur on Facebook?

Sarah Kessler provides a clear illustration of how social media has facilitated positive social change in a recent Mashable post, “Why Social Media is Reinventing Activism”:

In every effective social change effort that you want to look at there is an inner-core of tightly bound people,” says Allison Fine, the co-author of The Networked Nonprofit and an early defender of using social media for a cause. “That’s always been the case, whether it’s online or on land, that nothing happens without those tight ties, but nothing can spread without loose ties. Because a tightly tied inner-circle is a clique. Nobody else can get in. By definition, you cannot have a growing movement unless people can access it, and that’s what loose ties are for.

However, Gladwell denies the possible co-existence of the strong and weak ties that are necessarily a part of any mass movement. To Gladwell, social media innovators are grandiose “solipsists”. He is, of course more solopsistic than those social media enthusiasts he condemns. He is also tautological, and it is the resulting tunnel vision that betrays his arguments. Gladwell ignores the obvious complexities of media and social movements. Mass movements are necessarily messy. Martin Luther King Jr. may well have exerted disciplined control over his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), but that organization and the movement in general relied on a vast network of sympathizers and volunteers. Gladwell’s conclusion that social media, and its weak ties and easy actions are sapping the energy out of our progressive elements and thus a hindrance to real social change is never proved. How do we know that liking Darfur on facebook would take away from the type of organization needed to stop a 21st Century Jim Crow?

This conclusion rests partially on the assumption that hierarchies and networks are mutually exclusive. This  is reductionist at best. There are many major organizations have very centralized hierarchies on top, and yet rely on networks at the grassroots level, like Facebook itself, or the Obama Campaign in 2008.

Not that all is rosy in the political gardens of twitter and facebook (try searching #Obama – the birthers have apparently gotten a Koch Foundation social media grant!). Frank Rich points out that:

[Twitter] “ too has been easily corrupted by politicians whose 140-character effusions are often ghost-written by hired 20-somethings, just like those produced for pop stars like 50 Cent and Britney Spears.”
…

In this wild political ether where nobody knows who anybody is, the Internet provides cover, not transparency.

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Go online, and you’ll discover that many of those now notorious false fronts for oil billionaires and other corporate political contributors have Facebook pages. We don’t know who has written checks to Crossroads GPS, the more shadowy wing of American Crossroads, the operation concocted in part by Karl Rove to raise $50 million to attack Democrats. (There’s already $32 million in the bank, $10 million more than was spent bySwift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004.) But the American Crossroads page on Facebooksure looks like a bottom-up populist movement, festooned with photos of thousands of ordinary folk voting their “like” of the site. The Save Darfur Coalition page may have infinitely more friends, but it’s American Crossroads that has real clout in the real world even if nobody knows who is behind the screen.

However the fact that the forces of reaction have learned to use social media does not take away from the real good accomplished by activists online. Gladwell of course, doesn’t see it this way:

Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

If King were alive today, he would have a facebook page which he would be able to tightly control, and he would probably be listed on the NAACP Fan Page http://www.facebook.com/naacpfans. I’m not sure what a “wiki boycott” is, but social media would have helped the movement organize, communication, and coordinate its activities. These technological efficiencies would not limit the strength of the core connections or commitments at the base of the movement.

Social Media may be hyped but it is huge and it is real. Television, radio, and newspaper have all been folded up into the convergence. What social media does do is present “agents of change” the opportunity to do extraordinary things. According to another rather well known social analysis, major social epidemics happen when a little things add up to make a big difference. This point is called “The Tipping Point.”