malcolm gladwell's essay small change

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Small Change

By Malcolm Gladwell

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record . “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

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.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

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These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post —may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “ All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation —by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE . Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks , which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”

In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year . In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.

Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. 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.

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.

Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución . ♦

Clarification: This piece’s account of the Greensboro sit-in comes from Miles Wolff’s “Lunch at the Five and Ten” (1970).

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By Dhruv Khullar

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

By Bruce Headlam

By Christopher Weyant

The Tipping Point

Malcolm gladwell, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In The Tipping Point , Malcolm Gladwell tries to explain why certain ideas, products, behaviors, and messages become popular while others do not. Although this is an extremely broad topic, the book argues that all successful trends must reach a “tipping point”: in other words, a point at which they move rapidly from being almost unheard of to being very popular. A successful trend reaches its tipping point; an unsuccessful trend does not. As the phrase “tipping point” would suggest, trends don’t necessarily become successful because of large, conspicuous changes. Instead, a trend will often catch on because of a very small change in the content of the trend, the people who spread the trend, or the environment in which the trend is being spread. On the simplest level, then, The Tipping Point is about how small changes have enormous effects.

The book proposes three main ways to analyze a trend (also known as a “social epidemic”), and shows how, in each of these three ways, small changes can help an idea or product “tip” into popularity. First, ideas and products become popular because specific people become aware of them and spread the news to other people. But not all people are equally adept at spreading news. Indeed, a small, disproportionately influential number of people are responsible for doing the bulk of the work necessary to make a trend tip successfully (or so Gladwell argues). Second, ideas and products may also become popular because the ideas or products themselves are particularly enjoyable, memorable, catchy, or otherwise desirable. And yet, people don’t always remember or enjoy all aspects of an idea or product equally. Often, a small, seemingly superficial portion of the thing being disseminated is what makes it so memorable or interesting, and therefore, what makes it so trendy. Finally, ideas and products become popular because the environment in which they’re disseminated is particularly conducive. Again, the book shows how surprisingly small, and sometimes almost imperceptible changes in an environment, such as group size or the amount of graffiti on the walls, can have major effects on a person’s behavior.

It’s important to bear in mind that, for the most part, the book doesn’t judge whether trends are good or bad (although toward the end of the book, Gladwell takes a morally unambiguous position against social epidemics such as smoking, shootings, and suicide). As a result, the book has come under some criticism for what has been viewed as its apolitical discussion of the AIDS crisis, policing techniques, and other events. Furthermore, some critics have argued that the book’s thesis about the importance of small changes in major trends is overstated and oversimplified, or that the book proposes “Band-Aid” solutions for problems that require major, in-depth solutions. In response, however, Gladwell argues that big, societal problems don’t always require sweeping political reforms—and indeed, his book aims to counter the belief that they do. The Tipping Point attempts to correct for people’s natural bias toward large, observable events by arguing for the importance of small, often imperceptible changes—changes that, for better or worse, allow social epidemics to tip into popularity.

Tipping Points and the Importance of Small Changes ThemeTracker

Tipping Points and the Importance of Small Changes Quotes in The Tipping Point

It might have been 34 degrees the previous evening, and now it was 31 degrees. Almost nothing had changed, in other words, yet—and this was the amazing thing—everything had changed. Rain had become something entirely different. Snow! We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.

There is more than one way to tip an epidemic, in other words. Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.

When Winston filter-tip cigarettes were introduced in the spring of 1954, for example, the company came up with the slogan "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." At the time, the ungrammatical and somehow provocative use of "like" instead of "as" created a minor sensation. It was the kind of phrase that people talked about, like the famous Wendy's tag line from 1984 "Where's the beef?"

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

The subtle pro-Reagan bias in Jennings's face seems to have influenced the voting behavior of ABC viewers. As you can imagine, ABC News disputes this study vigorously.

The ABC viewers who voted for Reagan would never, in a thousand years, tell you that they voted that way because Peter Jennings smiled every time he mentioned the President.

In 1978, with Gold Box television support, every magazine on the schedule made a profit, an unprecedented turnaround. What's interesting about this story is that by every normal expectation McCann should have won the test. The gold box idea sounds like a really cheesy idea.

Giuliani and Bratton—far from being conservatives, as they are commonly identified—actually represent on the question of crime the most extreme liberal position imaginable, a position so extreme that it is almost impossible to accept. How can it be that what was going on in Bernie Goetz's head doesn't matter? And if it is really true that it doesn't matter, why is that fact so hard to believe?

The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

At Lambesis, Gordon developed a network of young, savvy correspondents in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and around the world in places like Tokyo and London. These were the kind of people who would have been wearing Hush Puppies in the East Village in the early 1990s. They all fit a particular personality type: they were Innovators.

Between 1955 and 1965, there wasn't a single case of suicide on the entire island. In May 1966, an eighteen-year-old boy hanged himself in his jail cell after being arrested for stealing a bicycle, but his case seemed to have little impact. Then, in November of 1966, came the death of R., the charismatic scion of one of the island's wealthiest families. R. had been seeing two women and had fathered a one-month-old child with each of them. Unable to make up his mind between them, he hanged himself in romantic despair.

The children of smokers are more than twice as likely to smoke as the children of nonsmokers. That's a well-known fact. But … that does not mean that parents who smoke around their children set an example that their kids follow. It simply means that smokers' children have inherited genes from their parents that predispose them toward nicotine addiction.

It's not about mimicking adult behavior, which is why teenage smoking is rising at a time when adult smoking is falling. Teenage smoking is about being a teenager, about sharing in the emotional experience and expressive language and rituals of adolescence, which are as impenetrable and irrational to outsiders as the rituals of adolescent suicide in Micronesia.

What these figures tell us is that experimentation and actual hard-core use are two entirely separate things—that for a drug to be contagious does not automatically mean that it is also sticky. In fact, the sheer number of people who appear to have tried cocaine at least once should tell us that the urge among teens to try something dangerous is pretty nearly universal. This is what teens do. This is how they learn about the world, and most of the time—in 99.1 percent of the cases with cocaine—that experimentation doesn't result in anything bad happening. We have to stop fighting this kind of experimentation.

A critic looking at these tightly focused, targeted interventions might dismiss them as Band-Aid solutions. But that phrase should not be considered a term of disparagement. The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. In their history Band-Aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Malcolm Gladwell — Analysis of Rhetorical Figures and Means in “Small Changes”

Analysis of Rhetorical Figures and Means in "Small Changes"

• Categories: Malcolm Gladwell

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Words: 887 |

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 887 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

• Gladwell, Malcom. “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” They Say/I: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. 2nd Edition. Graff, Gerald, Cathy
• Birkenstein, and Russel Durst; New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 312-327 Print.

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Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted-Malcolm Gladwell

The link address is: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

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All Tech Considered

The revolution will not be tweeted (unless it is).

Social media platforms may not create revolutions, but they sure can amplify them. Jason Nicholls/via Flickr hide caption

For those who were sure that Twitter, Facebook and the realtime web could either manufacture or replace personal qualities such as being courageous, determined, selfless, disciplined, steadfast and having a charismatic ability to inspire and lead others in moments of great historical importance, I’ve got some bad news.

It turns out that’s not case.

In his recent  New Yorker piece , Small Change , Malcolm Gladwell argues that the social web does not fundamentally change the nature of revolutions. As an example, he describes the Civil Rights sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960.

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.

Yes, folks. The Civil Rights movement took place at a time before Twitter. For those scoring at home, the same is true for every notable historical event from the Big Bang through the release of Destiny Child’s Bootlylicious video.

The realtime, social web is clearly not a required element to organize and execute a high impact revolution. Neither is a megaphone, but it sure makes it easier for the folks in the back to hear you.

Gladwell goes on to argue that that Facebook and Twitter create a kind of connectedness that is ultimately the opposite of what’s required for true activism.

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life … The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

I don’t know about you, but my Facebook and Twitter communities are made up of both weak ties and strong ones. I have several family members and best friends with whom I share an online connection. I would label them as strong ties. I also share online content with many people who I’ve never met.

Ultimately, it seems a bit foolish to separate our online and offline relationships into these defined buckets. The lines are clearly blurred. Our online worlds are an extension of our offline lives.

What’s the point of arguing that a communications platform doesn’t replace the personal and group characteristics required for activism? Of course Twitter and Facebook can no more do that than could two cans attached by a string. But it seems equally absurd to argue that communicating through the most modern channels will somehow erase those activism-driving traits.

Can you imagine someone saying, "I almost convinced my fellow member of an oppressed group to join me in the struggle for equal rights but in the end he was turned off by my decision to use a telephone instead of a fax machine. So he left me stranded at the lunch-counter and decided to join Greenpeace."

After losing his entire family as a teen during the Holocaust, my dad hid in a barn that was being searched by soldiers. When they left, he escaped and spent months alone in the forest and on the run during a particularly cold Polish winter. I’m convinced he would have derived little benefit from publishing a pithy tweet or unliking the Nazis on Facebook. But when he joined the Partisans, I assume they would’ve appreciated any improved modes of communication.

The most important moment in my dad’s youth was when he got his first gun. Did that gun give him the guts, smarts and determination required to survive World War II? No. But it sure provided an effective channel through which to express those traits.

Activism does not require technology. And technology doesn’t stop activism.

As our minds evolve along with these new technologies, the key connection between social media and revolutions will likely be a matter of focus. You will know about a lot more causes in the world. And you’ll have a more efficient medium through which to share information about those causes. But it will become increasingly difficult to focus intensely on one or two issues while blocking out the rest of the noise.

Gladwell touches upon this point as he complains about the limitations of our social networked connections:

It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

But again, that’s an oversimplified conclusion that places too much weight on the method of communication at the expense of what is being communicated. Of course Facebook is not the enemy of the status quo. Neither is the landline telephone I have in my house. People, not technologies, are enemies of the status quo. Though enabling those people to communicate more effectively is probably not going to win a lot of fans among repressive regime stakeholders.

Ultimately our communication channels are one step removed from our personal experience and any inherent weaknesses in the technology are beside the point. If you're sitting at a lunch counter in Greensboro and someone tells you to go, it's probably not going to matter a whole lot which iPhone model is in your pocket.

Dave Pell is a San Francisco based, Web-addicted insider, investor and entrepreneur. He has been blogging for more than a decade. This post first appeared on his blog Tweetage Wasteland .

Small Change Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Analysis

It is no secret that social media has become a powerful tool for organizing and mobilizing people. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement, we have seen time and again how digital platforms can be used to bring about real-world change.

But what many people don’t realize is that, while social media is great for raising awareness and coordinating action, it is not very good at sustaining long-term movements. This was made abundantly clear in 2011, when the Occupy Movement fizzled out despite having thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook.

The reason why social media is not very effective at sustaining long-term movements is because it encourages what sociologist Zeynep Tufekci calls “weak ties.” These are the kind of relationships that are easy to form and just as easy to break.

In contrast, strong ties are much harder to form but much more difficult to break. These are the kind of relationships that are built through face-to-face interactions and shared experiences.

The problem with weak ties is that they are not very good at sustaining long-term commitments. When the going gets tough, people are more likely to abandon a cause if they only have weak ties to it.

This is why movements like Occupy Wall Street have been so unsuccessful at sustaining themselves over the long term. The participants only have weak ties to each other, which makes it very easy for people to drop out when things get tough.

So if you’re looking to create a lasting social movement, you’re better off focusing on building strong ties rather than weak ones. Face-to-face interactions and shared experiences are much more likely to create the kind of bonds that can weather the storms of adversity.

Many people think that social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are revolutionizing social activism. Many others, on the other hand, stick to their guns in the conviction that these websites cannot achieve the same long-term societal transformations as hands-on activism can.

Author, Malcolm Gladwell argues that weak ties cannot bring about the same kind of social change as strong ties. In his article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, he states that Twitter and other forms of social media are not adequate to sustain large-scale social movements because they only strengthen weak ties.

Gladwell believes that online activism through sites like Facebook and Twitter make it too easy for people to participate in protests and revolutions without any real investment or risk. In order for a revolution to be successful, he claims, it requires participants to have strong ties with each other so that they can make personal sacrifices for the cause. Without these strong ties, Gladwell argues, a movement is unlikely to succeed.

Gladwell’s argument has been met with criticism from many who believe that social media can and has been used to successfully organizing large-scale protests and revolutions. While it is true that Gladwell’s claims may hold some validity, it is important to consider the role of social media in these movements in a broader context.

Social media does have some advantages when it comes to organizing protests and revolts. For example, it can be used to quickly mobilize large groups of people and spread information about an event or cause. Additionally, social media can help connect people who may not know each other in person but share similar beliefs or goals. However, these same advantages can also be seen as disadvantages.

The fact that anyone can join a protest or revolution through social media without any personal investment or risk means that the participants may not be as committed to the cause as those who have put their lives on the line. Additionally, the spread of information via social media can also work against a cause if it is inaccurate or misrepresentative.

Thus, while social media does have some advantages when it comes to organizing protests and revolutions, it is important to consider its limitations as well. Social media alone is unlikely to be successful in sustaining a large-scale movement over the long term. For a revolution to truly be successful, it requires participants to have strong ties with each other and a commitment to the cause. Otherwise, the movement is likely to fizzle out quickly.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” he explains how social media lacks the strong ties, willingness to sacrifice, and hierarchy of old-fashioned direct action. Because there is no independent feature found in traditional direct activism, social media will never be powerful enough to bring about a real social upheaval.

Gladwell begins his writing by exploring the civil rights movement and how it was successful. He says that the reason why the civil rights movement was able to succeed was because of the strong ties between people. The strong ties allowed for information to be distributed quickly and efficiently throughout the community. In addition, people were willing to sacrifice their time and safety for the greater good. Lastly, there was a clear hierarchy in which people knew who their leaders were.

Gladwell then goes on to contrast the civil rights movement with more recent social movements that have taken place, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement. He argues that while social media has given rise to more “weak ties”, it has not been effective in creating strong ties. In addition, people are not as willing to sacrifice their time and safety for a social movement that they are not as invested in. Lastly, there is no clear hierarchy in which people can look to for leadership.

The loyalty developed through these personal interactions grows in strength and perseverance. The Greensboro Four, which was chronicled by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeter, is a compelling example of a loyal friendship between four brave black students who fought for change by sitting at a local diner during a time when white customers were only permitted to sit and racial insubordination was met with violence.

Even though the men were outnumbered, outgunned, and had no weapons, they continued their sit-in until the day came when they were finally served. This event was a success not only because it resulted in an integrated lunch counter, but also because of the media attention that it generated which created support from people all around the country. The four young men were able to tap into something much larger than themselves, and that was the social networks that they belonged to.

The way we communicate has changed drastically in recent years with the rise of social media. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have given us new ways to connect with each other and share information. But while social media can be a powerful tool for organizing and raising awareness, it is not a panacea. As Malcolm Gladwell argues in his essay “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” social media is not well suited to certain types of activism because it relies on weak ties rather than strong ones.

The Greensboro Four were successful in part because they had strong personal relationships with each other and with the community around them. They belonged to social networks that provided them with support and resources. By contrast, online social networks are often much more diffuse and harder to mobilize. The weak ties that connect us online are not as likely to lead to sustained action as the strong ties that connect us in person.

So while social media can be useful for raising awareness and organizing people around issues, it is not a magic bullet. If we want to create real change, we need to do more than post and retweet. We need to build strong personal relationships and networks of support. Only then can we hope to make a lasting difference.

Sociology is the study of human social behavior, including the origins, development, organization, and functioning of societies. It includes the study of social interaction, social institutions, and social relationships.

Social media refers to the use of online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to communicate and interact with others.

A social network service (SNS) is an online platform that allows users to connect with friends and other people who share similar interests and activities.

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• History of The United States

Small Change by Malcolm Gladwell

Updated 30 June 2021

Subject History of The United States ,  Technology

Downloads 49

Category History ,  Science ,  Sociology

Topic Activism ,  Civil Rights Movement ,  Innovation

Malcolm Gladwell distinguishes clearly between conventional civil rights protests and modern protests. In the post, Minor Change: Why the Revolution can not be tweeted, Gladwell claims that conventional advocacy requires personal sacrifice, dedication, and a successful hierarchy of leadership. He believes that social media will improve creativity, connect people together and help to communicate knowledge to people in distant areas. Social media also empowered the poor to lead to social change (Gladwell, paragraph 2). He provides the example of the 2009 Moldavian Twitter Revolution, where Twitter helped pull people together against Communism. However, the role of Twitter compared to traditional means is negligible. Social media fails to create strong bonds and join people to resist social vices where personal sacrifice is a prerequisite. It is just a mere tool to create networks and cannot be relied to challenge the status quo. Civil right movement, unlike social media, was a high risk activism. Gladwell gives the example of the Mississippi Freedom Summer project of 1964 to support that social media is not capable of bringing change that requires sacrifice. The Sumer project admitted hundreds of volunteers to raise civil awareness in the South. Three of the volunteers (Michael Schewwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney), lost their live for the course. As the movement continued to faced increased resistance, 37 black churches were torched, participants were beaten, safe houses were bombed and those who escaped death were arrested. As a result, many of the activists dropped out. Gladwell insist that its only traditional activism can make people capable of high level commitment.Participants in the traditional movements were highly disciplined. Gladwell notes that participants in the Mississippi Summer Freedom Project were true supporters of the goals of the program. All participants had to provide personal contact. The Greensboro lunch encounter involving four students was an event that successfully challenged discrimination against blacks. The four students had strong personal relationships with one another and common encounters of social injustices. The participants were fully committed and had personal connection to the movements. Also unique to the traditional activism was the command hierarchy. For example, the N.A.A.C.P (National Association for Colored People) had formalized functions with an efficient center of command. Martin K Luther King was the center of command at the association’s southern Christina leadership conference. There was a well-defined division of labor characterized by highly disciplined groups. The various divisions in N.A.A.C.P were committed and performed functions via the established authority structures. Every participant had a role to play, and would be held accountable for their specific duties. There were key figures such as ministers to solve internal conflicts. Social media, on the contrary, has no defined system of leadership partly because participants are mostly strangers who have no personal connection with each other.Gladwell’s claim that traditional activism was a high level activism, marked by discipline and with a properly defined structure of command, is constructed on the assumption that social media is made of weak tiers. Although people share information about their feelings and thoughts in a very efficient manner, participants have no personal attachment to each other. Campaigns on the internet present opportunities to interact with a huge and diverse audience. Given that participants are mostly strangers to each other, so many people can sign up for a reason they do not fully comprehend. Internet users can easily sign up for a civil movement since they do not have to give a lot of personal details. Activists can therefore get a lot of Twitter followers to sign up for event, but that does not guarantee commitment and sacrifice. The author has efficiently used similes and anecdote to initiate emotional response from readers. The author mastery of similes is demonstrated when describes the spread of sit-ins, “It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.” In chapter one and six, Gladwell provides an anecdote of the 1960 Woolworth lunch event where four students stood against discrimination. He tells the story of four freshmen who sat at Woolworth in Greensboro and upon requesting for coffee, they were told ““We don’t serve Negroes here,” (Gladwell, Para. 2). The story helps readers understand the kind of discrimination at the time, where business people refused to serve customers on the basis of their skin color. In the mid-20th century society, Christianity ideology was one of the most common ideology shared by Americans. The civil movements were largely based on Christina principles. In the Christianity context, the word evangelism means spreading the love of God to all people. It would therefore be persuasive that Gladwell uses phrases such as digital evangelism, the evangelism of social media and the bible of the social media movement to match the efforts of an activist l. The efficiency of social media in spreading information meant to bring good social change can be compared to an evangelical Christian’s effort of preaching Gods love. Work CitedGladwell, Malcolm. "Small change." The New Yorker 4.2010 (2010): 42-49. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change”: A Rhetorical Analysis

Piercing screams, angry chants, and heartfelt tears: that is the climate of change. Compare this to the placid clicking of keyboards, the casual transmission of emoticons; it is evident which situation will go down in history. This is Malcolm Gladwell’s central argument in his essay “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” In order to convince readers that progress cannot be made through social media, Gladwell uses logos and ethos, an intellectual persona, and his unique writing style. He draws his audience in and convinces his readers that “social media cannot provide what social change has always required” (315).

Gladwell’s abundant use of real world examples and facts allows him to validate his argument. The best example of this tactic is the anecdote at the beginning of his piece: the two page-long summary of the well-known Greensboro sit-in during 1960. By the end of the spiel, Gladwell has caught his reader’s attention and has put his audience right into the situation, making his statement, “…it all happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or twitter” (314) potent and sufficient without any kind of explanation. Similarly, he does not express any opinion without giving a valid real-world example of why he thinks a certain way. Bringing up the demise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Al-Qaeda supports his perspective on how insufficient networks actually are in changing any kind of social order. These well-known examples give him credibility as well as a crucial means of appealing to his audience. Yet Gladwell’s use of logos was not the only rhetorical device that helped in conveying his argument.

The essay itself starts by dropping the reader right into the tense situation of the 1960 Greensboro sit-in. Presented with visual details of how the rebellion occurred, the reader can almost hear the sounds and feel the intensity during that time. This is Gladwell’s tactic for convincing the reader of the wisdom of his point of view. After the long introduction that undoubtedly captured the reader’s full attention, Gladwell gives an explanation for his opinion on the inadequate role that social media has played in activism nowadays. His explanation includes specific examples of the use of Facebook and Twitter, indirectly juxtaposing social activism during the 1960s versus today. He then brings up a different idea of the “so-called Twitter Revolution” of Moldova and Iran, giving the reader a different perspective on the irrelevance of social media in revolutions around the world. After concluding that argument, he picks up where he left off about the sit-in; he continues to do so throughout his essay, each time proving that the use of social media is inferior to directly confronting unjust hierarchies when it comes to social change. This kind of writing strategy keeps the reader engaged, a task which is the most important aspect in conveying an idea. However, this was not his only writing strategy that kept Gladwell’s readers coming back for more.

Throughout his essay, Gladwell maintained an intellectual, yet humble, tone. His word choice and syntax gave him an educated persona. This identity is vital in establishing credibility, which allows the reader to trust that Gladwell knows what he is talking about, helping him in his goal of convincing the reader of his perspective. Consider his statement on how social media has given people a means to speak up, “…the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voices to their concerns” (314). This quote shows his scholarly personality and revealing him as a balanced, educated observer, therefore appealing to his rational audience.

For the most part, Gladwell makes an effective argument on how the use of social media has not helped to dramatically improve social customs. However, I disagree with the positive connotation that he gives to uprisings and revolutions. By focusing on how inadequate social media is in achieving social change, Gladwell overlooks the deeper problem of how physical rebellions in the past have caused more disorder and destruction than they helped populations that are in need of aid and reform. Moreover, he neglects to mention that although social media is only good for spreading ideas, sometimes such communication is all that is needed in achieving meaningful social reform.

Malcolm Gladwell’s overall argument in showing the ineffectiveness of social media in social reform is efficient. His intellectual person as well as his use of logos, ethos, and a unique writing style helped him appeal to his readers. Naturally, he was able to successfully convey his opinion to his readers, who, in turn, will hopefully act upon this information. Gladwell’s perspective is valid in terms of how he approaches the issue of the insignificance of social media in changing social agendas. However, he fails to mention that the alternative, which includes rowdy crowds and violent attacks, can undermine the better goals of reformers and activists. This lapse weakens his argument, as rebellions could actually create more disorder, keeping society from achieving true progression.

Gladwell, Malcom. “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” They Say/I

: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. 2nd Edition. Graff, Gerald, Cathy

Birkenstein, and Russel Durst; New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 312-

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Malcolm Gladwell's "Small Change": A Rhetorical Analysis Noor Elagha College

Piercing screams, angry chants, and heartfelt tears: that is the climate of change. Compare this to the placid clicking of keyboards, the casual transmission of emoticons; it is evident which situation will go down in history. This is Malcolm Gladwell’s central argument in his essay “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” In order to convince readers that progress cannot be made through social media, Gladwell uses logos and ethos, an intellectual persona, and his unique writing style. He draws his audience in and convinces his readers that “social media cannot provide what social change has always required” (315).

Gladwell’s abundant use of real world examples and facts allows him to validate his argument. The best example of this tactic is the anecdote at the beginning of his piece: the two page-long summary of the well-known Greensboro sit-in during 1960. By the end of the spiel, Gladwell has caught his reader’s attention and has put his audience right into the situation, making his statement, “…it all happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or twitter” (314) potent and sufficient without any kind of explanation. Similarly, he does not express any opinion without giving a valid real-world example of why he...

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