The basics of the article: Gladwell offers a theory of social media-based organizing as a form of 'organizing' that builds weak social links, rather than the strong affinities that are the preconditions to change social relations most seriously in need of change. For the same reason that Facebook is great for organizing your interactions with acquaintances, it's good for meeting the needs of extremely low-commitment forms of activism. If you imagine that you are organizing successfully with social media, you could say that Gladwell ends on a really good self-analysis question:
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.Some people in Canada who remember the spontaneous social-media-populist response to the last prorogue of parliament may beg to differ, but of course, it crashed out as a mass movement, self-correcting back to what's perhaps a "normal" social movement configuration in Canada (a small group of die-hards struggling for support among a relatively small group of followers)— as soon as participants, me included, tried to extend CAPP's life beyond a second 'national day of action.'
Not to dump on the efforts of CAPP (I was certainly swept away with the possibilities, too), but I think a lot of the analysis why it crashed out isn't totally covered by "well, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament always had a limited life span." There were affinity-based reasons, too. None of us in the Edmonton wing of CAPP had strong affinity links with each other, certainly nothing of the kind of friendship-based solidarity, nor the solidarity of experiencing similar kinds of actual oppression, that participants in the lunch counter protests of 1960 Greensboro had. Our chaotic starting point (people of different backgrounds, experiences, and ideological 'certainties' thrown together) presented the conditions of the kind I've heard right-wingers gloat about before: that progressives can be beaten, because we don't all attend the same church. (There's a kernel of truth in that, and it's also covered (in a flawed way) in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, who asserts that because of the lack of strong affinities, progressives and lefties are good at the "air war" (propaganda bombardment) while conservatives are better at the "ground war" (where they hold positions of trust within institutions like churches).)
CAPP, actually, would be a textbook case for Gladwell in two ways. First, the vast majority of the Facebook group's supporters did not attend the rallies. I think that you could actually deepen Gladwell's analysis on this point. They did not attend rallies because social media, in this context, became an extension of mass media. As social media has matured, there is a strong interplay between mass and social media (CAPP was, predictably, covered as a Facebook story/phenomenon, rather than for the various kinds of demands it presented). So, as it would be in traditional mass media, CAPP was contained within a framework of populism, a context of instant "media blow-up" in which people are well-primed to "rally behind a leader-celebrity." (This context, in fact, led to almost endless celebritizing of the Facebook group's Edmonton-based founder, Christopher White, who would regale our group meetings with bizarre, ironic tales seemingly straight out of Monty Python's Life of Brian, of having to convince strangers that he wasn't the political "saviour.")
Here was the problem: populism-based organizing in this context can be anti-participatory, especially within the expected "democratic division of labour" of a nominal democracy like Canada's, where people involved in Parliament, like our MPs, "do democracy for us," while we go about our daily lives most of the time when we're not rallying behind "representatives." So if anything, social media presented both the possibility and the outer limit for CAPP. From the beginning, even though we tried (in vain) to recuperate the meaning of what we were doing when speaking to media representatives, by insisting the "social media" was only a tool and we were really quite traditional organizers, etc., it demonstrated lots of limitations of a movement whose relations to the rest of society were mainly established through socially-extended mass media.
Secondly, and let's not kid ourselves here, CAPP's purpose was strictly "buffing around the edges." Staunchly reformist, it attacked Harper and the prorogue, but didn't get too much deeper in its analysis even here, collectively, as a result of our organizing together— even about things like "democratic deficits." It didn't seriously address that there has been a strong continuity (more so than differences) between Liberal and Conservative government policy over the past 20 years, despite that the Edmonton "chapter" seemed to be in some kind of vague agreement about this. Deferring this question allowed CAPP to have temporary unity and allowed a "social media movement based success," in at least a stalemate (which could be measured by Harper meeting the "demands" for prorogue reform in a distorted way, by cancelling the parliamentary recess).
But deferring a deeper analysis, implicitly, committed CAPP to endless protests and thus again ran into an affinity-based problem: If you want to build successful, long-term movements, "affinity" is not just a prior condition, but an ongoing affair in which affinity "keeps up" with the ongoing and increasing demands of organizing. What it means is that the definition of "affinity" itself expands beyond one's friends, associates, roommates, partners, family, as part of this growth. In deferring the need to work against the grain of the Parliamentary system as a whole, and implicitly committing CAPP to endless rallies and protest, I think people instinctively realized CAPP would overwhelm the strength of their existing affinities. Not having even the strength of prior affinity-based associations to sustain us, it seemed safer in this context for most of us to quit while we were ahead.
To close, I want to point out an assertion of Gladwell's that I'm extremely skeptical about, in spite of the fact that the article is dead-on about strong affinities vs. weak social media links (as long as you extend your definition of "affinity" beyond your immediate like-minded close friends): Why does Gladwell present the only choice for social change as joining a hierarchical, militarized-chain-of-command organization (effective), OR social media networks (ineffective)? It's true that we're not going to be just handed the tools and social structures to make sweeping changes with, and so these are the most obvious options that we presently have. And it's also true that latter kinds of organizations are all that most people encounter now in Canada and the US. But I'm highly skeptical that the only choices we have are those ones. What if we took affinities as our starting point, and built something different?
