Gladwell's primary examples of contemporary online organizing -- Iran, Darfur -- are ones in which the barriers to Westerners moving beyond low-level involvement are extraordinarily high. Other than putting a badge on our Twitter icons or donating a few bucks to Doctors Without Borders, there's really not much that most of us can do about a political crisis halfway around the world. And so our organizing on those issues is going to be haphazard and short-lived.
In taking these crises as his model, though, Gladwell adopts an all-or-nothing approach to the question of whether activism is "serious." If you're not sitting in at a lunch counter, he suggests, or on the ground in Tehran, you're not doing much of anything. But another of his own examples reveals the poverty of that binary conception.
A few years ago, Gladwell notes, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur was diagnosed with leukemia, and discovered that because his ethnic group -- South Asians -- was underrepresented in the national bone marrow registry, there was no suitable match for him on file. His business partner launched an internet campaign to recruit South Asians to the registry, one that ultimately added 24,000 people to the list.
Gladwell cites this as an example of an effort that got people to sign up "by not asking too much of them," and on one level, that's correct. It takes minimal effort to click over to a website and type in your address, and not much more to swab your cheek and return the kit they send you.
It's easy -- but most people still don't bother. Most folks need a goad. And if that's all this had been, a goad to get people to do something easy and important, it would have been great.
It was quite a bit more than that, though, because actually donating bone marrow isn't easy. It involves a doctor drilling a hole into your pelvis. It's usually done under general anesthetic. The pain can persist for several weeks. And in a not-insignificant number of cases, serious complications result.
Yes, of course, it's easy -- or at least easy-ish -- to get someone to fill out a web form, and yes, of course, online communities do an excellent job encouraging that kind of low-cost "activism." But as every true activist knows, that first contact with a like-minded soul is the beginning of the process, not the end. And so it turns out that of the thousands of people who joined the registry as a result of this campaign, several hundred have already gone through the real sacrifice of donating marrow. All in hopes of saving a stranger's life. All as a result of a social media campaign.
And yet this phenomenon is offered as evidence of the triviality of online organizing.
Gladwell is right that strong-tie relationships were a crucial part of the Civil Rights Movement, and is a crucial part of any organizing effort. But he misses the fact that all strong ties start as weak ties, and that even weak-tie relationships can spur action within and between strong-tie communities.
Read more at www.huffingtonpost.com
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