Results tagged “malcolmgladwell”

Malcolm Gladwell gets started with "The revolution will not be tweeted" in this week's New Yorker, condemning social media's ability to enact real cultural change with an argument he sums up early in the piece:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Who are the "they"? It's not really clear. But even as someone who's had an "evangelist" title in the past, I don't come to refute Gladwell's strawman argument. His point is that today's social networks are fundamentally unable to drive the sort of social change that fueled upheavals like the civil rights movement. I agree; As I said last year, Facebook often enables politics of the sort that convinces college kids that changing their middle name on a website is a form of activism. And the idea that the uprisings in Iran were driven by Twitter or any other social media is clearly refuted by realities such as Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, the father of the Iranian blogosphere, being sentenced to nineteen years in prison. The traditional method sit-in and picket-in-the-streets form of protest is clearly a failure online.

Take A Bath, Hippie

The problem with Gladwell's premise, though, is that it's wildly anachronistic to think that the only way to effect social change is to assemble a sign-wielding mob to inhabit a public space. I cringe in anticipation of the day when the Tea Party realizes their protest marches will be as ineffective as the even more massive anti-Iraq war rallies were seven years ago. People who want to see marches in the streets are often unwilling to admit that those marches just don't produce much in the way of results in America in 2010.

However: There are revolutions, actual political and legal revolutions, that are being led online. They're just happening in new ways, and taking subtle forms unrecognizable to those who still want a revolution to look like they did in 1965. Gladwell is absolutely right to say that political action today takes place in the form of many smaller, simpler steps than it did when one used to have to put livelihood, liberty, or even life on the line to make change happen. That doesn't mean it's ineffective, just that it's a million small protests instead of one visible act. For me, it's a form of protest that feels much more Asian in its methods, with a steady trickle of small rebellions instead of the traditional western model of the visible, violent, aggrieved uprising. The evolution in the tactics of social change is what inspired the question I was trying to ask earlier this year:

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?

We have had an enormous and concerted act of social disobedience play out over the past half-decade, where millions have decided that the present regime of intellectual property law and corporate control over the way we communicate is no longer tenable. So, every day, with the click of a button, people from all walks of life are ignoring the law and protesting in public, simply by uploading content to YouTube or Facebook or anywhere else.

The disobedience is not just online. This past weekend, at the same venerable fairgrounds that hosted the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, Maker Faire finally found its way to New York City, after phenomenal events in California, the U.K., and Texas. Maker Faire (and Make magazine) were founded by the mild-mannered Dale Dougherty, whose quiet demeanor suggests he's anything but a radical, and whose own statements would, I'm sure, insist that he's just having fun, not doing anything political. The reality, though, is that Dale Dougherty is the man who coined the phrase "Web 2.0" (a concept potent enough that "2.0" has been applied to every discipline from sex to, yes, civil rights). He's got a knack for identifying where society is headed. And he's in a community that's doing a great job of getting organized.

The Maker Party

Today, Dale Dougherty and the dozens of others who have led Maker Faire, and the culture of "making", are in front of a movement of millions who are proactive about challenging the constrictions that law and corporations are trying to place on how they communicate, create and live. The lesson that simply making things is a radical political act has enormous precedence in political history; I learned it well as a child when my own family's conversation after a screening of Gandhi turned to the salt protests in India, which were first catalyzed in my family's home state of Orissa, and found out that my great-grandfather had walked alongside Gandhi and others in the salt marches that followed. Today's American Tea Partiers see even the original "tea party" largely as a metaphor, but the salt marches were a declaration of self-determination as expressed through manufacturing that took the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party and made it part of everyday life.

To his last day, my great-grandfather wore khadi, the handspun clothing that didn't just represent independence from the British Raj in an abstract way, but made defiance of onerous British regulation as plain as the clothes on one's back. At Maker Faire this weekend, there were numerous examples of clothing that were made to defy laws about everything from spectrum to encryption law. It would have been only an afternoon's work to construct a t-shirt that broadcast CSS-descrambling code over unauthorized spectrum in defiance of the DMCA.

And if we put the making movement in the context of other social and political movements, it's had amazing success. In city after city, year after year, tens of thousands of people pay money to show up and learn about taking control of their media, learning, consumption and communications. In contrast to groups like the Tea Party, the crowd at Maker Faire is diverse, includes children and adults of all ages, and never finds itself in conflict with other groups based on identity or politics. More importantly, the jobs that many of us have in 2030 will be determined by young people who attended a Maker Faire, in industries that they've created. There is no other political movement in America today with a credible claim at creating the jobs of the future.

Making A Revolution

The debate now is whether the leaders of today's political movements with the most potential for exceptional change will accept the mantle of simply being political leaders. Because they're already having enormous impact, and earning recognition from the President himself. President Obama's acknowledgement came early, right in his inaugural address:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

It wasn't the birthers or the truthers who earned the nod for helping shape America's future: It was the makers. Their protests, their sit-ins, take the simple form of making things and sharing them with each other, online and off. The quietness of their ways, the heads-down determination of the scientist instead of the chin-jutting attitude of the street fighter, might make them easy to overlook. But that doesn't mean that it's not a significant and enduring movement. it doesn't mean the will of these millions of people doesn't count, simply because it's expressed in a way that doesn't look like protest did five decades ago.

Best of all, the people who actually make these things happen aren't just sitting around clicking "Like" on things online. As has been true since the earliest days of the blogosphere, the best minds in social media get together in person to help plan the future. One such event that you can visit this weekend? The venerable ConvergeSouth. It takes place at NC A&T State University, the proud home of the freshmen students who in 1960 held that first sit-in at Woolworth's.

Update: A year later, Recognizing the Maker Movement, an interview with Dale Dougherty revisiting many of these ideas.

When I saw Malcolm Gladwell doggedly dissecting Chris Anderson's upcoming "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" (see Chris' response here) my first reaction was: Brilliant! Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired, and Malcolm Gladwell is a top brand name at The New Yorker, and as corporate cousins, clearly Condé Nast's publicity machine must have engineered this beef, trying to boost sales of both their titles through a completely manufactured rivalry.

Their past titles have been champions of what I call the "Airport Books" genre: The elite class of business titles that I see sold in airport newsstands next to the magazines and crappy romance novels. (I might have unknowingly stolen "airport books" from someone else, but I can't find a citation.)

Alas, I'm assured that this particular contretemps isn't a planned corporate PR stunt. (Though I know lots of nice folks at Condé, they don't seem to mimic street-level hip hop marketing as often as one might hope.) Instead, it seems the criticism and counter-argument are sincere.

The core of Gladwell's argument is simple: "Free" fails to provide data to support its claims about the future of pricing, using anecdote and confident assertion in place of actual evidence. In his objection to this methodology, Gladwell seems uncharacteristically strident, compared to his usual measured tones. Whenever I see somebody getting their dander up, I think of one of the first things I ever blogged about ten years ago: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves. Ah hah!

Let's see what criticisms have been leveled at Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, the juggernauts of the airport book genre:

• The IUP Skeptical Inquirer's Wesley Cecil has a review of Blink which offers this up: "Gladwell relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. The centerpiece of each chapter is a short story or series of stories that are supposed to illustrate some aspect of his theory of snap judgments. ... [I]ntuitive feeling triumphs over careful study. ... [O]ne case does not an argument make."
• Slate's Jack Shafer on Gladwell telling a tall tale at The Moth, which kind of ridiculously insinuates that this is a character flaw instead of just a fun story.
• More definitively, the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani made this point in her review of Outilers, but extends it to apply to all of Gladwelll's books: "[His] books are filled with colorful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use PowerPoint-type catchphrases (like the 'stickiness factor' and 'the Rule of 150') to plant concepts in the reader’s mind. ... 'Outliers' Mr. Gladwell's latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. ... [His examples are] all based not on persuasive, broadband research, but on a flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories."
• Joel Spolsky keyed off of Kakutani's review on his popular blog: "what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works." (Bonus points to Joel for swiping en passant at airport book titan Thomas Friedman and his cartographic ironing board.)
• Kevin Arthur's post built on Joel's rant, offering a slightly more measured, but still critical analysis: "I feel like clarifying my opinion on this... I think there is great value in pop science books, in articles written by non-experts, and in anecdotes. I read Joel's piece not as a rant against all those things but against those things badly done."
• Peter Coclanis at Open Letters just gets downright mean: "[L]et me say from the get-go that my goal in this piece, which focuses on Outliers, is to demonstrate at once how wildly overstated such just-jacket claims are and how egregiously incomplete, insubstantial, and unconvincing Gladwell’s explanation of success actually is. His methodology stinks, too, and, from his dust-jacket photo, he appears to need a haircut." I know what fun it can be to bash someone from afar on the web, but I bet Coclanis is a lousy dresser. Just sayin'.
• And not to belabor the point, but let's close up with Isaac Chotiner in The New Republic, taking a stridently snarky look at Outliers: "By the time Gladwell reaches his penultimate chapter, he is in full inspiration mode, and impervious to all forms of critical thinking. ... Here is the Gladwell method nicely on display: a questionable assumption, a partial walk-back of an earlier claim, and finally another questionable assumption synthesizing the half-reversal."

My goal is not to ennumerate all of the criticisms of Gladwell's books — I enjoyed reading all of them, and I like his New Yorker pieces, and that's kind of all I would ask of the guy. But I can't help but wonder if being ceaselessly criticized for using assertions and anecdotes in lieu of hard statistical data has left him much more inclined to criticize others for using the same technique.

I haven't had a chance to finish reading Free yet, but I am sure that both of these authors' books absolutely do lean more towards anecdotal evidence than statistical proof. And honestly, it's okay that these books don't necessarily follow the tenets of hard science. In many cases, they're arguing that a cultural trend is becoming true, or is about to become true, and the reality is that asserting that these trends are ascendent actually helps them come true. In short, these are books designed to create culture, presented in the guise of reporting on culture. I like that!

But of course there will always be those who disagree with the idea of starting from a premise first, and then finding examples to support it. Perhaps the last word in favor of using hard data to support social observations may be from a story package in Wired a year ago, which was headlined "The End of Science" and anchored by a story called The End of Theory:

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

... But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. ... The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

The author of this compelling argument in favor of using overwhelming amounts of data to help replace formulating theories about human behavior? Former scientist Chris Anderson.

Bonus link: If you're interested in actual debate about the content of the book, Mike Masnick's excellent overview over at TechDirt is a must-read.

Apropos of our little discussion a few weeks ago, Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts on defining a racist. To some degree, he's talking about measuring racism on a semi-defined scale.

[T]he context in which something is said, and the identity of the speaker obviously make a great deal of difference in how we react to the speech. But if there is in fact a hierarchy to hate speech, on what basis should comments be judged? I'm curious to hear the thoughts of others on this.

Gladwell proposes a scale based on content, intention, and conviction. This neatly forgives people who simply mis-speak, or those who unintentionally offend without malice, while properly condemning those silver-tongued few who are able to say vile things about groups of people without using any actual slurs or epithets.

Race is always a difficult topic -- every time I write about it on my blog, I get a few defensive comments that I mostly don't publish, a few IMs from white friends saying "I'm not sure that's fair...", a few IMs from black friends saying "You're being a bit presumptuous again..." and then a whole lot of people, including most of my readers saying, essentially, "BOOOO-RING!"

Maybe we should make this more fun? With a clear scale for measuring racism, we could make a website for it! (raceometer.com is still available.) Enter in your potentially racist speech, get back a racism score, and put the badge on your site. The fact that we've got three dimensions to measure on means that you could have a Race Cube, whose size would increase based on how offensive you truly were. If you came up with something horrendous, but you didn't really mean it, you'd get a zero in "conviction" and end up with a flat square.

Or if you're Mel Gibson, and meet all the requirements, maybe you'd prefer a trading card game, where you could boast about your score. And then hopefully the truly racist cards would become increasingly rare over time and this kind of offensiveness would exist only as a thriving market on eBay. I've included an artist's rendering here for collectors.

I'd started reading The Long Tail (You've read the blog, now buy the book!) by surprising myself with how excited I was to read the book; After all, I'd read the original article in Wired when it came out, and have been following Chris' blog since it started. Was there really anything new left? How could I still be interested in a topic that long ago became part of the scenery for the Web 2.0 and VC crowd?

In short, it's just plain good writing. My enjoyment of the book probably centers around the extensive amount of hard data used to gird the book's examples, as well as the pleasingly broad set of cultural influences and examples used to illustrate the effects of the Long Tail. I've criticized the technology industry often for its unrepentant insularity; The breadth of culture in The Long Tail amply evidences the fact that the phenomenon extends well past the confines of the traditional definition of "technology" as an industry.

Above all else, using a wider range of source material than even the seminal Wired article, along with the phenomenal amount of primary research into sales data, makes the book something very impressive and unique. The Long Tail is profoundly intellectually honest.

I'm on the record as a genuine admirer of Malcolm Gladwell, but I have to say that one of the most accurate of the persistent criticisms of his work is that it often substitutes qualitative anecdotes for qualitative evidence. Given that this is, to some degree, what Blink is about, I don't find this a particularly egregious habit. But it is nevertheless a valid point to raise, and The Long Tail is a stronger book for the near-scientific rigor of much of its analysis. (Informing this discipline, no doubt, is Chris's stints at Nature and Science.)

But here's an example of how the breadth of the narrative really got my gears turning. If you read this site back when I used to do my Daily Links, you might remember the history of house music I linked to. It's an encyclopedic and comprehensive resource that, along with the dictionary of samples, was one of my favorite links ever. Interestingly, house music comes up near the end of The Long Tail.

Now, I believe that, without hip hop and remix culture (of which house music is firmly a part), there would be no blogging. "Rip, Mix, and Burn" isn't merely a tenet of digital culture, it's among the fundamental principles of post-disco black music, which has consistently shaped contemporary culture. And that's important to note because The Long Tail isn't a book about business, or the Internet, or even economics. At least, it isn't merely about economics; It's a book about a change in culture.

Of course, The Tipping Point reached its, well... you know, after somehow morphing from being a book about cultural trends into being perceived as a business guide. So I'm not surprised that The Long Tail is packaged that way; The same audience might well purchase it for the same reasons. Indeed, Reed Hastings' back-cover blurb suggests that The Long Tail will sit on your shelf between The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. Presumably these books are all also bad and good for you.

But I digress. House music, you say? Let's go to the tape:

What was notable about the rise of house was that it was both a reaction to the bankruptcy of blockbuster culture and a vibrant culture of its own. DJs and clubs created a music industry that was radically different from pop music. Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around it.

Naturally, there's a lengthier explanation of why this is so in the book, along with an acknowledgement of Umair Haque for contributions to the analysis. But what struck me as noteworthy in this, admittedly minor, part of the book was the pleasantly catholic set of influences. There's a lot of commonalities between the various long tail-based media that media hackers and culture jammers tend to gravitate towards.

I think it's no coincidence that many early bloggers (and, especially, many people who made blog-related tools) have been influenced by hip hop's remix culture, or by the multifaceted beat-matching culture of DJing. It's not just the methods of distribution that are similar; It's the aesthetic of mix-and-match, more lately referred to as Rip, Mix, and Burn.

Have I mentioned that, in addition to being an early investor in Six Apart and a skilled blogger, Joi Ito used to be a house DJ in Chicago? It's true.