As mentioned in class, I think Gladwell is trying to create a false dichotomy between in-person, strong-tie based organizing and its social media counterpart. There is no reason why the two cannot complement one another as part of a single organizing effort. I completely agree that strong ties are required to inspire the vast majority of people to take large risks; I personally would be very unlikely to participate in a sit-in unless at least a few people I knew were going along with me and believed just as strongly in the cause. But that does not mean that social media does not have the power to tap into strong ties that might otherwise lie dormant.

Some of the most important supporting examples here come from after 2010, when Gladwell wrote the article. I think it is worth returning to the example of Egypt. Attending a protest in Tahrir Square, where injury or death due to police brutality or fighting among protesters was entirely possible, is certainly on par with participating in a sit-in at Woolworth’s. Yet it is unreasonable to say that Twitter, Facebook, and social media organizing did not play a significant role in bringing hundreds of thousands of Egyptians to the streets. The beauty of Twitter and Facebook here was that they connected people who already tended to activism and for whom weak ties were a sufficient inspiration to participate. These people in turn went out to their close friends and relatives and convinced them to join. But there is no way such strong ties alone could have led to the organization of such a large protest in a such a small timeframe. Networks of strong ties are by nature much sparser (e.g. each person only has a few close friends) than those of weak ties, and information flow through them is much slower. So while the Woolworth’s sit-ins may have occurred primarily due to word of mouth through strong ties, they took far longer to get off the ground than they would have in the Internet era. In effect, social networks in one fell swoop seeded many networks of strong ties with the idea of protesting, parallelizing the spread of the message.

I would also like to argue that social networks alone, without any help from strong ties, can effect significant change if the number of people who need to take bold action is small. For example, a large-scale social media effort to find an organ donor for a sick person may reach many people who, because there are no strong ties involved, choose to ignore the call. But if at just one of the thousands or millions of people who are reached is selfless enough to donate, the effort is a success. In essence, social networks dramatically increase the likelihood of reaching such outliers who, contrary to Gladwell’s accurate generalization, respond strongly to requests from weak ties. In fact, such a response probably could not be obtained just by resorting to strong ties – sometimes even people who are close to us may be either be incapable of or unwilling to do something that a complete stranger might. Now, if Gladwell means to focus solely on large-scale organizing then this sort of search for outliers is irrelevant, as the few outliers who may exist are not sufficient to achieve the goals at hand. But he speaks more broadly about change and the inability of weak ties to do anything nontrivial, and I think on those fronts these points directly refute him.