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Democracy in Cyberspace: What Information Technology Can and Cannot Do Author(s): Ian Bremmer Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 6, The World Ahead (November/December 2010), pp. 86-92 Published by: Council on Foreign Relations Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20788719 Accessed: 22-08-2018 17:26 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Foreign Affairs This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Democracy in Cyberspace What Information Technology Can and Cannot Do Ian Bremmer "Information technology has demolished citizens tools to build alternative sources time and distance/' Walter Wriston, the of power. The democratization of com former ceo of what is now Citigroup wrote munications, the theory goes, will bring about the democratization of the world. in 1997. "Instead of validating Orwell's There seems to be plenty of evidence to support these ideas. In the Philippines [it] enables the citizen to watch Big Brother. And so the virus of freedom, for which in 2001, protesters sent text messages to vision of Big Brother watching the citizen, there is no antidote, is spread by electronic organize the demonstrations that forced networks to the four corners of the earth." President Joseph Estrada from office. In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elec Former Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have artic tion in Ukraine, supporters of Viktor ulated a similar vision, and with similarly Yushchenko, then the leader of the oppo grandiose rhetoric. All have argued that sition, used text messaging to organize the long-term survival of authoritarian the massive protests that became the Orange Revolution. In Lebanon in 2005, states depends on their ability to control activists coordinated via e-mail and text the flow of ideas and information within and across their borders. As advances in messaging to bring one million demon communications technology?cellular tele strators into the streets to demand that phones, text messaging, the Internet, social the Syrian government end nearly three networking?allow an ever-widening decades of military presence in Lebanon by withdrawing its 14,000 troops. (Syria complied a month later, under consider share ideas and aspirations, technology will break down barriers between peoples able international pressure.) Over the and nations. In this view, the spread of the past few years, in Colombia, Myanmar "freedom virus" makes it harder and cost (also known as Burma), and Zimbabwe, circle of people to easily and inexpensively lier for autocrats to isolate their people fromdemonstrators have used cell phones the rest of the world and gives ordinary and Facebook to coordinate protests and Ian Bremmer is President of the Eurasia Group and the author of The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between Statesand Corporations? [86] This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Democracy in Cyberspace transmit photographs and videos of gov Americans. Similarly, Americans believe ernment crackdowns. The flood of words that the millions of people around the and images circulated by protesters follow world who use the Internet, an American ing Irans bitterly disputed 2009 presidential invention, will eventually adopt Ameri election?quickly dubbed the "Twitter can political beliefs, much like many of revolution '?seemed to reinforce the view those who wear American jeans, watch that Tehran has more to fear from "citizen American movies, and dance to American media' than from the U.S. ships patrolling music have. Champions of the Internet s the Persian Gulf. power to promote pluralism and human But a closer look at these examples rights point to bloggers in China, Russia, suggests a more complicated reality. and the Arab world who are calling for Only in democracies?the Philippines, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Colombia? democracy and the rule of law for their countries, sometimes in English. But of the hundreds of millions who did these communications weapons accomplish an immediate objective. In blog in their own languages?there are Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Iran, they more than 75 million in China alone?the managed to embarrass the government but not to remove it from power. As vast majority have other priorities. Many more of them focus on pop culture rather Wriston acknowledged, the information than on political philosophy, on pocket revolution is a long-term process, cyber book issues rather than political power, and space is a complex place, and technological advances are no substitute for human wisdom. Innovations in modern commu nications may help erode authoritarian power over time. But for the moment, their impact on international politics is not so easy to predict. There are many reasons why the opti mistic view of the relationship among communications, information, and democ racy has taken root in the United States. on national pride rather than cosmopolitan pretensions. In other words, the tools of modern communications satisfy as wide a range of ambitions and appetites as their twentieth-century ancestors did, and many of these ambitions and appetites do not have anything to do with democracy. NET NEUTRALITY A careful look at the current impact of modern communications on the political First, these communications tools embody development of authoritarian states should give pause to those who hail these tech twenty-first-century innovation, and Americans have long believed in the power nologies as instruments of democratization. of invention to promote peace and create Techno-optimists appear to ignore the prosperity. And with good reason. Admirers fact that these tools are value neutral; there of Reagan argue that the United States' is nothing inherently pro-democratic about ability to invest in strategic missile defense them. To use them is to exercise a form of sent the Soviet leadership into a crisis of freedom, but it is not necessarily a freedom confidence from which it never recovered. that promotes the freedom of others. The light bulb, the automobile, and the In enabling choice, the introduction of airplane have changed the world, bringing the Internet into an authoritarian country greater personal autonomy to many shares something fundamental with the FOREIGN AFFAIRS - November/December2010 [87] This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Ian Bremmer attacks and mob justice. In China, the advent of elections. Some have argued that promoting elections in one country Internet has given voice to wounded in the Middle East will generate demand national pride, anti-Western and anti for elections elsewhere there. "A free Iraq is Japanese resentment over injuries both going to help inspire others to demand what real and imagined, and hostility toward I believe is a universal right of men and Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs, and other women," Bush said in July 2006; elections minority groups. It has also become a in Iraq would prompt the citizens of Iraq's kind of public square for improvised violence. In an article for The New York neighbors to ask why Iraqis were now free to choose their leaders whereas they Times Magazine earlier this year, Tom were not. Similarly, some have argued that Downey described the "human-flesh the freedom that comes with the Internet search" phenomenon in China, "a form will inevitably democratize China. Once of online vigilante justice in which Inter Chinese people read about the freedoms of net users hunt down and punish people others, the thinking goes, they will want who have attracted their wrath." The the same for themselves. The tools of targets of these searches, a kind of "crowd modern communications will reveal to sourced detective work," as Downey put Chinese citizens the political freedoms they it, can be corrupt officiais or enemies of do not yet have and provide the means to the state, or simply people who have demand them. made other people angry. But the limited history of elections in These problems are hardly unique to China. In Russia, skinheads have filmed the Middle East shows that people do not murderous attacks on dark-skinned im always vote for pluralism. Sometimes, they vote for security or absolutism, sometimes to express outrage or defend local interests. The same pattern holds true for the Internet and other forms of modern communica tions. These technologies provide access migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia and posted the footage online. Also in Russia?and in the United States and Europe?hate groups and militants of various kinds use the Internet to recruit to information of all kinds, information new members and disseminate propa that entertains the full range of human ganda. Of course, beyond all this fear and loathing, many more people around the world use the Internet as a global shopping mall and a source of entertain ment. The Internet makes it easier for appetites?from titillation to rationaliza tion, from hope to anger. They provide the user with an audience but do not determine what he will say. They are a megaphone, and have a multiplier effect, but they serve users with political interests to find and both those who want to speed up the cross border flow of information and those who engage with others who believe what want to divert or manipulate it. evidence that it also opens their minds they believe, but there is little reliable Cyberspace can be a very dark place. In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier argues that the anonymity provided by the Internet can promote a "culture of passions?consumerism and conspiracy theories, resentment and fanaticism? sadism," feeding an appetite for drive-by but it promotes calls for democracy only to ideas and information that challenge their worldviews. The medium fuels many [88] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume 89 No. 6 This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Democracy in Cyberspace where there is already a demand for democracy. If technology has helped citizens pressure authoritarian govern ments in several countries, it is not because the technology created a demand for change. That demand must come from public anger at authoritarianism itself. their political power. In June, the Chinese government released its first formal state ment on the rights and responsibilities of Internet users. The document "guarantee[d] the citizens' freedom of speech on the Internet as well as the publics right to know, to participate, to be heard, and to oversee [the government] in accordance STATESIDE with the law." But it also stipulated that Citizens are not the only ones active in "within Chinese territory, the Internet is cyberspace. The state is online, too, pro under the jurisdiction of Chinese sover moting its own ideas and limiting what eignty." That caveat legitimates Chinas an average user can see and do. Innovations "great firewall," a system of filters and in communications technology provide re-routers, detours and dead ends designed keep Chinese Internet users on the state people with new sources of information to and new opportunities to share ideas, but they approved online path. also empower governments to manipulate The Chinese leadership also uses more the conversation and to monitor whatlow-tech means to safeguard its interests online. The average Chinese Web surfer people are saying. The collapse of Soviet communism cannot a be sure that every idea or opinion generation ago taught authoritarian lead he encounters in cyberspace genuinely reflects the views of its author. The gov ers around the world that they could not simply mandate lasting economic growth ernment has created the 50 Cent Party, army of online commentators that it and that they would have to embrace an capi talism if they hoped to create the jobs and pays for each blog entry or message-board post promoting the Chinese Communist the higher standards of living that would ensure their long-term political survival. Party s line on sensitive subjects. This is a But to embrace capitalism is to allow for simple, inexpensive way for governments dangerous new freedoms. And so in order to disseminate and disguise official views. to generate strong growth while maintain Authoritarian states do not use technology ing political control, some autocrats have simply to block the free flow of unwelcome ideas. They also use it to promote ideas turned to state capitalism, a system that of helps them dominate market activity their own. through the use of national oil companies, NONALIGNED MOVEMENT other state-owned enterprises, privately owned but politically loyal national cham The techno-optimists who hope that mod pions, state-run banks, and sovereign ern communications tools will democratize wealth funds. Following precisely the same logic, authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening authoritarian states are also hoping that they will help align the interests of non democracies with those of democracies. But the opposite is happening. Efforts by police states to control or co-opt these tools are inevitably creating commercial FOREIGN AFFAIRS - November/December2010 [89] This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Ian Bremmer conflicts that then create political conflicts the citizens of the two countries closer between governments. together, conflicts over the flow of infor In January, Google publicly complained mation through cyberspace will further that private Gmail accounts had been complicate the already troubled U.S. breached in attacks originating in China?Chinese relationship. Signs of strife are already visible. When attacks that Chinese officials appeared to tolerate or even to have launched them Google first went public with its complaints selves. In protest, Google announced that about cyberattacks and censorship, Beijing it would no longer censor the results of looked past the company, which it sees as users' searches in mainland China, which a high-tech arm of the U.S. government, and addressed its response directly to Washington. A Chinese Communist Party Beijing refused to back down, and Google tabloid ran an editorial under the headline "The World Does Not Welcome the White automatically redirected searches by Chinese users to the uncensored Hong Houses Google"; it argued, "Whenever the U.S. government demands it, Google Kong version of the site. But much to the can easily become a convenient tool for relief of mainland users, mostly students and researchers who prefer Google's promoting the U.S. government s political capabilities to its main domestic rival, will and values abroad." In response, U.S. Baidu, Chinese officials eventually an Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged nounced the renewal of Google's operating companies such as Google not to cooperate license. (It is possible that they backtracked with "politically motivated censorship," because they believed that they could further emphasizing the difference, not control Google or use it to monitor the the convergence, of political values in the United States and China. online activities of political dissidents.) As Chinese technology companies Revealing similar fears about the future begin to compete on a par with Western of its political control, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia took action ones and the Chinese government uses legal and financial means to more actively earlier this year against Research in Motion promote domestic firms that see censorship (rim), the Canadian company that makes it had reluctantly agreed to do when it entered the Chinese market in 2006. as a routine cost of doing business, there the BlackBerry, for equipping its devices will be less demand for Google's products with encryption technology that authorities in China. In August 2010, the state-run cannot decode. Arguing that terrorists and Xinhua News Agency and China Mobile, spies could use BlackBerries to communi cate within the uae without fear of being the country's largest cell-phone carrier, announced plans to jointly build a state detected, Emirati officials announced in owned search-engine and media company. August that they would soon suspend In response to these developments, U.S. BlackBerry service unless rim provided state officials with some means of moni technology companies will undoubtedly turn to U.S. lawmakers for help in creating toring BlackBerry messaging. Within two and maintaining a level commercial playing days, Saudi Arabia announced a similar shutdown, although Riyadh and rim have and Chinese political values and bringing since reached a compromise that requires field in China. Far from aligning American [90] FOREIGN AFFAIRS ? Volume 89 No. 6 This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Democracy in Cyberspace rim to install a relay server on Saudi halt the proliferation of weapons of mod territory, which allows Saudi officials to ern communications, but they can try to monitor messages sent from and within the monitor and manipulate them for their own country. The uae will probably also make purposes. That struggle will continue as well, a deal with rim: there are half a million limiting the ability of new technologies to BlackBerry users in the uae (about ten empower the political opposition within percent of the population), and the country these countries and creating more conflicts wants to remain the Arab world s primary commercial and tourist hub. Yet far from promoting Western values in non-Western police states, the BlackBerry has sparked a over political values between democratic and authoritarian states. FEEDBACK LOOPS new round of debate over the willingness ofThe Internet may have changed the world, Western technology companies to protect but now the world is changing the Internet. their market shares by making concessions For 30 years, new communications tech that help authoritarian governments spy on their citizens. nologies have driven globalization, the defining trend of the times. The companies In fairness to these governments, the that created these products made long worlds leading democracies are no less term plans based on the wants and needs concerned about potential terrorist threats of consumers, not governments. Their posed by unmonitored messaging. The profits rose as they connected billions Indian government has also threatened to of customers with one another; borders ban BlackBerries unless rim gives it access became increasingly less important. But now, the pace of technological to certain data, and counterterrorism officials in the United States and Europe are change and the threat of terrorism are forc considering the option as well. Via efforts ing policymakers to expand their definitions to amend the Electronic Communications of national security and to rethink their Privacy Act, the Obama administration definitions of "critical infrastructure." As a result, governments are turning to gain access to "electronic communication high-tech communications firms to help has already taken steps to help the fbi transactional records"?recipients' addresses, shore up emerging security vulnerabilities, logs of users' online activities, browser and high-tech communications firms histories?without a court order if inves have begun to think more like defense tigators suspect terrorism or espionage. contractors?companies whose success Politicians and technology companies such depends on secrecy, exclusivity, political as Google and rim will be fighting these contacts, and security clearances. battles for years to come. As a result, political borders, which Of course, authoritarian governments, the rise of information technology once unlike democracies, also worry that indi seemed set to dissolve, are taking on a new importance: if greater openness creates new opportunities, it also creates new challenge their political legitimacy. China, worries. Unable to match U.S. defense Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Ara spending, China and Russia have become bia, and other authoritarian states cannot adept at information warfare. The Pentagon viduals who are neither terrorists nor spies will use new communications tools to FOREIGN AFFAIRS - November/December2010 [91 ] This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Ian Bremmer reported last August that China continues to develop its ability to steal U.S. military secrets electronically and to deny its adver saries "access to information essential to intranets closely monitored by various governments. The Internet is not about to disappear, but the prediction that a single Internet could accommodate both the West and the evolving demands of conduct combat operations." In 2007, a authoritarian states was never realistic. massive cyberattack launched from inside Russia damaged digital infrastructure in American and European users will access neighboring Estonia. The United States' the same Internet as before, but the Chi vulnerabilities range from its nuclear power nese government has already made clear plants and electrical grids to the information its intention to declare sovereignty over systems of government agencies and major an Internet of its own. Other authoritar U.S. companies. Despite their political and ian states have every incentive to follow commercial rivalries, the United States, its lead. China, Russia, India, and many other states also share a vulnerability to cyberattacks, and they have pledged to work together to build a joint cybersecurity strategy. But when it comes to espionage, governments can never fully trust one another. And of course the Obama administration does not There are far too many variables at work to predict with confidence the full, long term impact of modern tools of commu nications on the political development of authoritarian states. But it seems safe to expect that their effects will vary as widely as the motives of the people and the states want to share technologies that would make that use them.? it easier for security officials in Beijing or Moscow to track the online activities of political dissidents. Other problems will exacerbate inter national tensions. Technology firms in the United States and Europe, mindful of Google's recent troubles in China, will increasingly turn to their governments for help with their own security needs. As cyberthreats become ever more sophis ticated, these companies will collaborate more actively with national security agen cies on developing new technologies. This will pull more technology companies into the orbit of the military-industrial complex. That, in turn, will make them even more suspect to authoritarian regimes and likelier targets for hackers and spies of all kinds. Borders are about to become much more important. The result will be a world that has not one Internet but a set of interlinked [gz] FOREIGN AFFAIRS ? Volume 8 9 No. 6 This content downloaded from 165.230.224.163 on Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:26:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker Annals of Innovation October 4, 2010 Issue Small Change Why the revolution will not be tweeted. By Malcolm Gladwell t four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. A “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around ve-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate ags. Someone threw a recracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.** https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 1/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty- ve miles away, and Durham, fty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the rst day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter. he world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and con dent to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfei e, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once de ned by their causes, they are now de ned by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a signi cant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the T https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 2/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.” These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal signi cance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests —as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters ew a Romanian ag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.” Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is. VIDEO FROM THE N YORKER How Fortnite Captured Teen-age Minds https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 3/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker reensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who rst sat down at the lunch counter were terri ed. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the rst day, the store manager noti ed the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated. G The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirtyhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 4/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker seven black churches were set on re and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo —that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart. What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest. So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one oor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 5/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was anked by his roommate and two good friends from high school. he kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life. T This is in many ways a wonderful thing. 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. It’s terri c at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism. In a new book called “The Dragon y Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not nd a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the email to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 6/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty- ve thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match. But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve nancial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise. 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. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty- ve cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacri ce but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacri ce. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro. T he students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 7/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen- fties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and . Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action. The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important con icts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.” This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose. This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 8/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task. There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to con ict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say? The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the internationalrelations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms— made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.” In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more uni ed and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly in ltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a uni ed hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective. The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 9/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city. Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for con ict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made in nitely 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. he bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan T https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 10/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends. When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news lter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police led the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassi ed the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back. Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this ght. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age. Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It 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. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 11/12 8/22/2018 Small Change | The New Yorker that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause. Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦ * Clari cation: This piece’s account of the Greensboro sit-in comes from Miles Wolff ’s “Lunch at the Five and Ten” (1970). Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1996. Read more » © 2018 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our a iliate partnerships with retailers. Ad Choices https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell 12/12 Jia Ni Basic composition Prof. Troiano Paper 2 RD 10.15.2018 Benefits of The Internet Wa With the unprecedented development of the society, the living standard of all the people around world has been increased a lot. In the recent year, scientist have invented advanced technology to make people’s life more convenient. Individuals have more different way of enjoying the entertainments, social network, medical treatment, education and so on. The development of different types of technology has brought various benefits to human’s lives, especially the emerging of the internet and social network. Ian Bremmer and Malcolm Gladwell both indicated this topic in their article. In the article, What Information Technology Can and Cannot do, Bremmer indicated that the advanced communication technology break down barriers between peoples and nations. The spread of “freedom virus”(86) which is the multiple choices of living life gives ordinary citizens tools to build a alternative sources of power. In Gladwell’s article, Small Change, the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism, which helps the society get improved and become more internationalized. Even though communication technology lack of physical presence which will leads to negative influences on society, pluralism will be eventually achieved and the global interaction will bring economic prosperity and better world The sense of responsibility is hard to present on the cyber communication. The communication technology such as Facebook, instergram have created lots of arugement and comflict online. People do not need physical present therefore when they are expressing their opinions, they would not think about the the influences of their languages. Gladwell mentioned in his article, “We don’t serve Negroes here” (1). It was the case happen in 1960, four college students tried to get coffee in the lunch counter. Even in the daily life, some people still have the narrow minded and discrimination. When people can speak out online without any present, they would probably say something much more unrespectful and do not need to take any responsibility. The people who do not fit into the mainstream which is the general social norm, are very easy to get insulted. The cyber violence kills thousand of people every year and the case will not reported to the police, and no one will be responsible for that. Someone would say, “you should not care about what people say to you online”, however, the cyber violence can spread like a virus into a person’s daily life. The information pass by really fast, even a really short message can be spread to all over the world. People do not have the awareness that words are danger than a gun. Bremmer also mentioned, “As cyberthreats become ever more sophisticated, these companies will collaborate more actively with national security agencies on developing new technology”(92). Internationally, for example, Google, the firm in United States were getting suspect to authoritarian regimes, like hackers and spies. Some counties tend to use spies and hackers to gain the information and induction the words online. Especially in some developing country, people do not have enough ability to discriminate the real and fake information, which will lead them blindly believe in some negative information about their own country. And they will blindly judged and bring more despondent information into the public, which also bring chaos for the government. Bremmer and Gladwell both indicated their concern of the communication technology. Those people who act not respectfully and attempt to bring chaos to the society will gradually decrease, because the security of the technology are getting improved and people are becoming more and more understanding of each other. Communication technology bloom the pluralism to the society. Before the internet borned in the world, people communicate with each other by letter, phone. It all takes time to get in touch with someone. Now people only need to press some buttons on the screen and then can exchange the information immediately. Bremmer wrote, “these technologies provide access to information fo all kinds, information that entertains the full range of human appetites —from titillation to rationalization, from hope to anger ”(88). Hundred years ago, there was no chance for a regular person has chance to communicate with a person who from another country. Right now people from all over the world have same access to talk to each other. People start to have more connections and understanding between each other. For example, Instagram is one of the most popular social media around the world. People can post and share their person life and interesting thing there. A photographer can share a picture took in Norway and people who live in United States can have the same enjoyable when they are looking at the beautiful view they never seen before. And they have full access to see and know how a person lives who from a total different country and cultures. They can share their person view and what they think about of a topic. The information can get exchange so fast that people can see different kind of restaurant that are always popular around the world, like Chinese food, Thai food, American food. The nature of pluralism is people can accept any different kinds of culture and get along with each other. Like Gladwell said, “Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances”(6). On the social media, it is like a information melt pot. People can learn and obtain the information directly, gaining knowledge and enhance their horizon efficiently. The social media has the full strength to give people’s power to become more understandable and knowledgeable. Eventually, people can have better understanding of those people who are living in a different environment, therefore, there’s less and less bias and discrimination in this society. And people will start to notice the way of their speaking online, they will gradually have more compassion and empathy to stand in different perspective to understand other people. There will be less social conflict and violence and the government can save money to invest money to more important things, like strengthen the nation strength. Domestic and international Economy is always the hottest topic among people. Based on the development of the Internet and related technology, there’s more and more international agreements to help each countries have more interaction and resources exchange. The market exploring and the labor recruitment can be achieved based on the developed Internet information system—the big data era. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation”(7), Gladwell mentioned that in his article. The development of the social media has brought extra benefits on economy, such as the big company Google and Youtube. These two company gather the diverse insight and outsight together to share them all to the people around the world, therefore especially the industry of entertainment, such as movies, music and advertising. Bremmer also mentioned the same perspective in his article, “The Internet may have changed the world, but now the world is changing the Internet”(91). It is true that the companies around the world have created more products make long-term plans based on the wants and needs of consumers. The borders became increasingly less important nowadays, because the international cooperation can not to stop by the prosperous of Internet. The advanced communication technology bring a lot convenience of international trade. There is more negotiate between different counties in the world, and there will be more agreement that benefits both part of the counties.
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Benefits of the Internet

With the unprecedented development of the society, the living standard of all the people
around the world has been increased a lot. In the recent year, a scientist has invented advanced
technology to make people's life more convenient. Individuals have a more different way of
enjoying the entertainments, social network, medical treatment, education and so on. The
development of different types of technology has brought various benefits to human's lives,
especially the emerging of the internet and social network. Ian Bremmer and Malcolm Gladwell
both indicated this topic in their article. In the report, pros and cons in Information Technology
Bremmer indicated that advanced communication technology break down barriers between
peoples and nations. The spread of "freedom virus"(Bremmer, 86) which is the multiple choices
of living life gives ordinary citizens tools to build alternative sources of power. In Gladwell's
article, Small Change, the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism, which helps
the society get improved and become more civilized. Even though communication technology
lack the physical presence which will lead to negative influences on culture, pluralism will be
eventually achieved and the global interaction will bring economic prosperity and a better world.

SURNAME 2
The sense of responsibility is hard to present on the cyber communication.
Communication technology such as Facebook, Instagram has created lots of arguments and
conflict online. People do not need physical presence when they are expressing their opinions;
they would not think about the influences of their languages. Gladwell mentioned in his article,
"We don't serve Negroes here" (Gladwell 1). It was the case that happened in 1960; four college
students tried to get coffee in a lunch counter. Even in daily life, some people are still narrowminded and discriminative. When people sh...


Anonymous
Great study resource, helped me a lot.

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