Gladwell on Social Activism in the Age of Twitter

ATM-Object-Greensboro-Woolworth-lunch-counter-388 I finally finished Gladwell's New Yorker article about social activism and new media. Gladwell believes that Twitter and Facebook can't help bring about serious social activism, because those online connections are weak. Real social activism requires hierarchical leadership and strong connections among members.

I'll come back to Gladwell and his critics in later posts. But I do have to say that I loved his writing about how the civil rights movement caught fire. 

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.