

Malcolm Gladwell Gets It Wrong – Again  - cwan
http://www.pehub.com/84248/malcolm-gladwell-gets-it-wrong-–-again/

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ghshephard
The Gladwell hating gets out of hand sometimes. I'll be the first to admit the
man isn't what you would call a rigorous scientist in the social disciplines,
but I don't think that he makes that claim. Rather, he provides interesting
(if overly broad) insights into patterns that we may or may not have noticed
ourselves - and does so in an entertaining fashion.

The New Yorker article the author is commenting on, is actually pretty
insightful. Gladwell makes it clear that most social networks are broad and
thin, but the networks that result in disciplined individual behavior are
those that are reinforced through close, physical, interpersonal ties.

A simple mind-experiment is useful to capture this:

What percentage of the 500 friends you have on facebook will come over and
help you move tomorrow if you sent out a request?

Now, what percentage of the friends that you see, in person, on a weekly basis
would do so if you sent a request out to them?

That meeting in person creates a much richer, and committed relationship than
Poking/Walling/Liking does.

I think that's all Gladwell was trying to state in his New Yorker Article.

~~~
cjy
The problem with that analogy is that people rarely respond if asked to do
something as part of a group. By nature, a mass facebook request isn't
personalized. It's like asking if anyone in the class knows the answer vs.
picking on a particular student. If the request is made to the group, it is
too easy to free ride on others.

It's not fair to compare all your friends on facebook vs. only your closest
friends in person. If I sent a request for help via a group text to everyone
on my phone I'd probably get less of a response than if I sent personalized
messages to my 15 closest friends on facebook. You have to compare apples to
apples.

~~~
dasil003
Officially known as "diffusion of responsibility". It's the reason why, if you
are a witness to an accident and you are attending to an injured individual,
you are supposed to point to a single individual bystander and tell them call
for an ambulance rather than say "someone call 911".

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dbingham
The author misses the point of Gladwell's piece completely.

 _"He’s wrong. Facebook does motivate people to do things they wouldn’t
otherwise do -– like donate to the Save the Darfur coalition via a Facebook
page."_

He agrees with the post author, that's exactly what social media does. But
what it doesn't do is motivate people to go to Darfur, take a real risk and
make a difference on the ground. That's his point, and he's right.

~~~
credo
Excellent point.

Gladwell's thesis is that high-risk activism and revolution are "strong-tie"
phenomena and require real friendships.

He contrasts that with the "weak-tie" social media scene where people are
friends on Twitter or Facebook, but wouldn't really risk their necks based on
what their "weak-tie" friends tell them.

The "Save the Darfur coalition" Facebook page demonstrates what a weak-tie
network can do and Gladwell's essay also talks about the (limited) usefulness
of weak-tie networks (when he uses Shirky's example). It doesn't refute
Gladwell's point

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acqq
One more thing people who discovered the new communication media today forget
is: the "social" media existed for much longer, and if anybody would want some
serious analysis, we already have decades (even centuries?) of experience,
even with much less noise than of today and with more people being more of
"peers." I'll spare you of the stories of old Usenet or even chat
functionalities before the "web" existed. Much more existed for much longer.
There's just more people behind the screens today.

My personal experience is: online communication can help in motivation to do
something, but only as long as it actually leads to communication or
engagement "in flesh." It's as simple as that, and it can be the easy way to
measure real impact of online activity. So I'd say, Gladwell is more than
_right_ this time. As long as you just sign online petitions or join Facebook
groups with the names "save the ...", it's just the "feel good" activity with
no real impact. Whoever wants more scientific measurements has an easy method
to measure the real impact.

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gefresh
I didn't find the authors argument to be particularly compelling. Sure
facebook may be able to motivate people to do small things like make a
donation but he offers no evidence to counter Gladwell's assertion that really
revolutionary change won't be driven by social media. I'm not saying that
tweeting and facebook won't be involved in revolutionary change, just that
they probably won't drive it. Just look at the teaparty as an example ... one
of the biggest social movements of our generation and they are certainly not
social media driven

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robchez
I don't agree with the author here.

I think the social media websites do little or are actually detrimental in a
way to causes such as the ones shes outlined. Sure they allow people to
quickly 'donate' or shoot out a tweet, or change there profile picture as some
form of protest. People will feel happy and think they have done something and
then the it is all forgotten.

Case in point is Haiti. Everybody donates, concerts were held and everyone
felt great. They assume there money was spent by some poor Haitian to rebuild
his home. Yet no-one has followed up with the fact that the money isn't
getting there [1].

[1] <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/cb_haiti_earthquake>

~~~
dasil003
Similarly she trots out the Tehran protests which I seem to recall being
debunked pretty thoroughly as another feel-good American media frenzy, but
with almost no effect on the ground in Tehran. For instance, most of the major
Tweeters at the time were not even in Iran, and people involved in the actual
protests were not tweeting at all. At best it raised American
awareness—especially within tech circles, but very little tangible impact.

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nodata
What is it exactly that Malcolm Gladwell consistently gets wrong? Is there a
trait? Any good sources on this?

~~~
spacemanaki
I generally enjoy Gladwell's writing in the New Yorker (haven't read any of
his books) and enjoy hearing him on Radiolab, but there has been at least one
case before where he has made oversimplifications. When noticed, they pretty
much upended his thesis.

His article "How David beats Goliath" asserted that smaller, weaker
competitors beat their stronger, better equipped opponents by dramatically
changing or breaking the rules of engagement.

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell)

One of the examples was average or weak high school basketball teams using a
full court press technique to defeat the best teams in the league. The other
example is Lawrence of Arabia defeating the Ottomans at Aqaba. In letters
which were published later that summer, readers pointed out that a full court
press is used by many "Goliath" teams, and that the Ottomans were actually the
underdogs since Lawrence of Arabia had the support of the British Empire.

I'm not a basketball person or a historian, so maybe the letters were off, but
the New Yorker did publish them, and they certainly did make me question the
article which I had so enjoyed a month before.

The letters in question:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2009/06/08/090608m...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2009/06/08/090608mama_mail2)

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2009/06/08/090608m...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2009/06/08/090608mama_mail3)

Maureen Tcacik wrote about him in The Nation, and was generally critical of
his style and methods, but also a little admiring. Interesting read.

<http://www.thenation.com/article/gladwell-dummies>

And just for HN, I dug this up because it made me laugh:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?_r=1)

"He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power
law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a
basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give
portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when
a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt
to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. "

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jrockway
This is just linkbait. The title should be "why I disagree with Gladwell".

~~~
misterm
The article was also a pretty weak criticism.

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Joeboy
There's a point that's not being made here, which is that if you're doing
high-risk activism there's a good chance you want its organisation to be
private. In fact you may well want to do it in a safe location, with people
you _really_ trust, who have left their mobile phones and any other risky
electronic equipment somewhere else. I suspect the next (maybe current)
generation of activists is going to struggle with that a lot, because they're
pretty much cyborgs.

