There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

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Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

These are all worthwhile and important points, and a necessary correction to the (over)hyping of Twitter and Facebook. However, I think Gladwell’s denigration of weak ties in social activism is a bit misplaced. I’d like to begin by revisiting Mark Granovetter’s classic 1973 paper, eloquently titled “The Strength of Weak Ties”. The paper is best known for its study of employment history. Granovetter found, for instance, that people were nearly three times as likely to have found their job through a “personal contact” than through an advertisement, headhunter or other “formal means”. In other words, success is largely about who you know, not what you learned in school or how you searched on Monster.com. Furthermore, more than 80 percent of these helpful personal contacts tended be people we only saw “occasionally” or “rarely,” which is why Granovetter called them “weak ties”. The lesson is that your best friend probably won’t help you get a job. Instead, the unemployed should spend their time chatting with distant acquaintances on Facebook.

But Granovetter didn’t limit himself to employment. In that 1973 paper, he also delves into the subject Gladwell is writing about: social activism. He comes to a very different conclusion. Granovetter begins by looking at the West End of Boston, a largely Italian neighborhood that was gutted in the 1960s by a redevelopment project. At the time, the project was widely opposed by the community, and yet they failed to prevent it from going forward. What happened? According to Granovetter, a large part of the problem was the absence of weak ties within the West End. At the time, the neighborhood was dominated by small “clumps” of intimacy, or lots of strong ties. Granovetter quotes another sociologist on life in the area, noting that “sociability is a routinized gathering of a relatively unchanging peer group of family members and friends that takes place several times a week.” Granovetter then goes on to imagine how such a density of strong ties (but relative paucity of weak ones) might inhibit social activism:

Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements, or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962); otherwise one has no particular reason to think that an advertised product or an organization should be taken seriously. Enthusiasm for an organization in one clique, then, would not spread to others but would have to develop independently in each one to insure success.

Granovetter goes on to argue that weak ties play a seminal role in building trust among a large group of loosely affiliated members, which is essential for rallying behind a cause. (He compares the West End to Charlestown, which was full of “bridging weak ties” and successfully fought off a massive urban renewal project.) While Gladwell argues that the flat hierarchies of online networks are a detriment to effective activism – he cites the leaderless P.L.O. as an example – Granovetter points out that leaders of social movements often depend on weak ties to maintain loyalty. He notes that organizations dominated by strong ties tend to produce fragmentation and cliquishness, which quickly leads to the breakdown of trust. This suggests that part of the reason Martin Luther King was able to inspire such discipline among a relatively large group of followers was that he cultivated a large number of weak ties. As a result, people felt like they trusted him, even though they barely knew him. Here’s Granovetter:

Leaders, for their part, have little motivation to be responsive or even trustworthy toward those to whom they have no direct or indirect connection. [This is what happens in a group without weak ties.] Thus, network fragmentation, by reducing drastically the number of paths from any leader to his potential followers, would inhibit trust in such leaders.

Obviously, this 1973 paper doesn’t explore the implications of weak ties that develop online. Do all those Tea Party activists feel like they have weak ties with Sarah Palin? Perhaps these online relationships are intrinsically different than those weak ties we form at the office, or the dinner party? These are all important questions, and I don’t think we have many good answers.  But I would quibble with Gladwell’s wholesale rejection of weak ties as a means of building a social movement. (I have some issues with Shirky, too.) It turns out that such distant relationships aren’t just useful for getting jobs or spreading trends or sharing information. According to Granovetter, they might also help us fight back against the Man, or at least the redevelopment agency. The Revolution certainly won’t be televised. But it just might be helped along by Twitter.

Authors: Jonah Lehrer

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