Sunday, October 10, 2010

Toward a new model of social change

I just wrote a big post about Malcom Gladwell's article in The New Yorker, but somehow this blogging software ate it all. $^####! What a disappointment.

I don't feel like rewriting it all, but here's a brief summary:

Malcolm Gladwell believes, based on historical research, that major social change is brought about by highly committed groups with strong ties, while today's social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) encourages creation and maintenance of low-commitment weak ties. In his words, the social media "makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient." Therefore, it's an improvement of the existing system, but not a creation of a new one.

I agree with his current assessment, but let's compare this situation to the rise of cities, where a large number of weak ties, eventually, played an important role in creation of various groups with strong ties. The social media of today can't enable us to produce things together within the social media itself. Using a metaphor, it still hovers above the world of real goods and events, touching but not changing it. With one major exception, of course, for the hacking culture, capable of creation of a wide range of new ventures inside the hovering space itself. To me, this is a strong indicator that the emerging social infrastructure will produce a major change, the timing of the change or its exact nature is difficult to predict yet. I'll speculate more about it in my subsequent posts.

tags: control, efficiency, evolution, infrastructure, network, niche construction, s-curve, social, system

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