The main argument of Gladwell is based in the strength of the ties of the networks, he argues that the social movements that are based on strong ties could perform better and accomplish something more significant than the ones that are based on weak ties, the main difference between them as Gladwell put it is the use of internet and digital social networks, but that couldn’t be that simple.

I agree with him that internet has been a new tool to reach more people and to get information from other social circles, as described by Granovetter the weak ties are great to reach a large corpus of people in social networks and to get the news to a bigger audience, and in the other hand the strong ties are based on confidence on other people and they are helpful to involve closes friends in different issues. But I don’t agree in the some of the criticism that he does to the networks with weak ties.

First of all all networks have weak and strong ties, it is in that mix of ties that the power of networks is, the weak ties help to reach a larger audience, meanwhile the stronger ones help to organize the network. On the other hand, the social movements that had been happening in the last years have both dimensions, a physical one in the public space and a digital one, and in both the use of networks has been a key point.

The example that I’m more familiar with is the Ayotzinapa movement in Mexico, in this case the use of twitter and facebook helped to spread the word of what has happened, it was in the social networks that the news started to flow, people were sharing news, videos, images and opinions of the tragedy in Guerrero, in this case the weak ties that were in twitter and facebook were useful to reach a larger audience and also to show some information that wasn’t flowing in traditional media outlets, and the strong ties where useful to collect information that was trustworthy, it was easier to trust in and article shared by a close friend, or to aim to go to the streets when a close friend or a family member share the information on this sites.

The social networks also helped to start organizing the people, they were the new dorms, were people talk ad share ideas, and they were, also, were people organized to get out to the streets, where the word were spread, the demonstrations organised and where people talked to get out. Then there’s the moment to get to the streets, and here is where the strong ties also played a role, people where more likely to get out to the streets knowing that their friends where going to be there.

Then during the demonstrations the use of social networks and the presence of weak ties where crucial to get information of what was going on and to spread it in cases of police abuse, during the events the networks helped to follow in real time what was happening, getting photos, tweets and videos from different cities and to coordinate the actions, get information of police presence, etc. At the end of the demonstrations there were some arbitrary detentions by the police in those cases the use of internet was helpful to spread the word, getting video of police abuse and posting it online played a key role to gain attention and to get the people out of jail. In those cases the weak ties between networks and individuals helped.

One last thing is that even if networks are distributed and they don’t have a hierarchy, they have centralities and preferential attachment, this means that some nodes (people) are going to get more exposure on the networks, so they could take a decision a pass it along the network, also the messages that are posted by one of the central nodes are more visible than those that are from nodes with least ties.

The use of networks in social movements isn’t something new, the networks had been present since always, the main difference is that now we have new tools to build them and to create larger ones, this could be problematic, but also this could help to get more attention to other issues, to get more people out in the streets (as we saw in Mexico some months ago) and to coordinate larger movements.