Now that 2011 is coming to a close, it’s worth looking back at an intellectual argument that played out just as the year was beginning — back before we saw the spread of the Arab Spring, the UK riots, the Occupy movement, and so much else.
In one corner was the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, who argued in an October 2010 piece that the media had oversold Twitter and Facebook as tools for political action. Citing research by Doug McAdam, a Stanford sociologist who studied the biographical patterns in 1960s civil-rights activism, Gladwell emphasized the distinction between “strong-tie” social connections — close, personal relationships of the sort that drew committed activists to protests in the Jim Crow South, despite the risk to their lives — and “weak-tie” ones, the kind of connections you have with acquaintances who might merit your friendship on Facebook, or a follow on Twitter, but not (say) the opportunity to borrow your car. Online social networks, Gladwell argued, were inherently weak-tie affairs, and therefore ill-suited to get people out into the streets.
