Social Media Does Not Have to Bring About Racial Desegregation

Malcolm Gladwell's "Annals of Innovation" New Yorker article "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted" in the October 4, 2010, issue is, in my opinion, totally off the mark when it comes to social media.

Let me first state that I thought Gladwell's books THE TIPPING POINT and OUTLIERS were brilliant. In both books he takes various events and ties them together to prove the individual book's overarching theme.

But in the New Yorker article he seems not so much to be comparing and contrasting apples and oranges as to be comparing and contrasting apples and kangaroos.

If I understood the article correctly (and it is hard to follow Gladwell's inclusion of what I would call "everything and the kitchen sink" elements), he believes that social media such as Twitter and Facebook can never create the type of social change that was created by non-violent actions during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Now he may be correct in this view – although I think it is way too early to know for sure – but where I feel Gladwell is very much mistaken is in comparing these two phenomena in the first place.

The non-violent protests of the Civil Rights movement had an explicit purpose – to force the American South to integrate blacks into schools, movie theaters, public drinking fountains, etc. In other words, to get rid of the Jim Crow laws that forced segregation on a great swath of the United States.

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook have many purposes – some of them purely social, some of them purely business, some of them a combination of the two – but nowhere does social media set itself up to cause the kind of social change that the Civil Rights movement had as its only purpose.

Gladwell spends much of his article talking about strong ties and weak ties. And even here I do not agree with the conclusions he draws.

In fact, I think that Gladwell's article has produced a gumbo stew in which he has thrown in as many variant ingredients as he can think of to prove a point that is not at all a valid point.



Read the whole article now to see whether you agree with me.

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of Miller Mosaic Social Media Marketing. She is also the author of the novel MRS. LIEUTENANT, which deals in part with racial prejudice in the U.S. Army in the spring of 1970 during the Vietnam War.