• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, November 9, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell, that delightfully frizzy public intellectual, recently argued in The New Yorker against the commonly held belief that social networks will transform activism by making it easier for people to organize and participate. And, well, he couldn't be more wrong.

To review, Gladwell argued that online social networks are composed of "low intensity" relationships, a swipe at all those people with online "friends" they've never met, and maybe don't even particularly like. According to Gladwell these "meh" relationships (as I call them) don't provide sufficient motivation for people to undertake high-risk activism of the type seen during the civil rights movement, where small groups come together and put themselves in harm's way to achieve social change. Rather, this sort of activism is catalyzed and spread through close personal connections between activists; for example, you might go on a Freedom Ride if your brother was going, but probably not by yourself.

I believe Gladwell is wrong on a number of counts. First, he distorts the character of online social networks, which are not composed exclusively of low-intensity relationships. Why couldn't your brother recruit friends and family to join him on the Freedom Ride via Facebook?

Second, he is incorrect in stating that the egalitarian, de-centered structure of social networks makes them unsuitable for real activism, which he believes must be organized by hierarchical vanguard groups. Gladwell overlooks the fact that civil rights protestors weren't always organized into top-down groups like the Southern Leadership Conference; instead, these emerged when ordinary people came together, created roles and titles, decided who should be in charge, and divided up responsibilities - all conscious choices which could just as easily (in fact, far more easily) be carried out online through online social networks. In other words, social networks are a blank canvas where we may create whatever we wish, just as our modern, democratic mass society enables the formation of civic organizations devoted to any number of causes.

Third, Gladwell is wrong in dismissing the importance of casual support. Yes, these less-than-zealous supporters might not be laying down their lives for the cause, but ultimate success depends on achieving mass support among the mostly passive masses. Indeed, the real objective of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches wasn't registering 1,000 disenfranchised people to vote - it was securing passage of the Voting Rights Act, which Martin Luther King, Jr. accomplished by influencing public opinion at the national level.

But the real problem with Gladwell's slap is that it is both premature and unhistorical, drawing definitive, pessimistic conclusions in a way that should make marketers wary.

Because Gladwell hasn't witnessed social networks facilitating "real" activism (meaning, the kind that overcomes fundamental social injustice), he concludes that they can't and never will. Never mind that the social networks have been around for less than 10 years, and that contemporary American society doesn't face any issues nearly as divisive as the civil rights movement, around which activists might be inspired to organize; no, it just simply isn't possible to use social networks this way, concludes the wise prognosticator, who issues his incredible prediction - sweeping vast future possibilities into the dustbin of pop psych analysis - on the basis of about six years of evidence.

As goes the debate over online activism, so goes the debate over online marketing - because if you make a statement about one you are basically making a statement about both of these closely related disciplines. In short, if someone tells you that your idea for a new social media marketing strategy just "isn't possible," because social networks just "don't work that way"- don't believe the hype. Considering that social networks are simply a reflection of human society, experience suggests that anything is possible.

Erik Sass is a MediaPost reporter and columnist. His second book, The Mental Floss History of the United States: The (Almost) Complete and (Entirely) Entertaining Story of America was released this fall.