For the guy who practically invented the term "tipping point," it's bizarre role.
Gladwell's argument, in the broadest of brush-strokes, is that Tweets do not make revolutions. "Deep roots and strong ties" do. In network theory, "strong" ties are those you make with people in your close circle; "weak" ties cross clusters of friends. According to Gladwell, people only start movements with people they know and trust; no matter how many Facebook friends we have, without real face-to-face relationships we'll be ineffective activists. Conversely, with strong connections and long-simmering frustrations, people can bring down Iron Curtains without the aid of Web 3.0.
The main problem with Gladwell's attack on the Twitterati is that he's battling straw men. No one claims that online networking on its own can spur a social movement; most internet cheerleaders simply claim that new information-sharing technologies can speed broad political action. Given the pace with which Egypt, Jordan and Yemen pulled together forceful demonstrations after Tunisia set the model, that lesser claim is hard to argue.
But if anyone were to argue that some, if not all, revolutions are more than accelerated by Twitter - that they are triggered by information sharing tools - you would think it would be Gladwell himself.
Clay Shirky lays the foundation of what such an argument would look like. Working off of Susanne Lohmann's study of East Germany in 1989, Shirky suggests that mass movements don't happen just when everyone is deeply discontent with the status quo (whether the status quo is a dictator or institutional racism). They don't even happen when everyone knows that everybody else shares their discontent. But when everyone knows that everyone knows that everybody's pissed off - that's when group action starts.
This is what Shirky says the military calls "shared awareness." You can imagine, Shirky describes, looking at a fire and noticing that others see the fire too - but it's only when you make eye-contact with with another onlookers that you all can go into coordinated action.
That moment of group "eye-contact" is exactly the kind of spark you'd think Gladwell would dig. It's the kind of tipping point that triggers an "information cascade", to use network theory terminology. Without "shared awareness", a nation of profoundly miserable people who know everyone else is equally unhappy, could go on being miserable for a very long time, if not forever. Think of North Korea.
North Korea is, of course, the extreme case. But extreme examples are telling. In a nation of virtually no information sharing, it's clear that the point of "shared awareness" may never be reached. On the other other, the Susanne Lohmann study and pretty much every revolution before 1990 make it clear that revolutions likewise don't need high-speed internet to get triggered.
Egyptians no doubt had other means of tipping each other off to "knowing they all knew". The big question is whether those other means - such as Al Jazeera, friend networks or the Muslim Brotherhood - would have been enough to bring Egypt to shared awareness? It's a question that will never have an answer - but it's not entirely implausible to argue that, without the internet, Egyptians may have had to wait many years longer before tipping each other into revolution.
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