On February the 1^st in 1960, four black college students sat at the counter of a lunch place in a town in North Carolina. At that time, the seats were only to be used by white people and black people were allowed to only use the stand-up snackbar at one end. One of the students asked for a cup of coffee, but the waitress said that they don’t serve negroes there. The four students stayed there until the end of the day and when they left, a small crowd had gathered. One of the people in the crowd was a photographer for the local newspaper. The students stated that they would be back the following day.

The next day, 27 men and 4 women came to the place. The men were dressed in suits and ties and all of them sat at the counter and were they were doing their schoolwork there. The following day, black students from Dudley High joined them, and the number of protesters was 80. The fourth day, the protesters reached 300, including 3 white women and the fifth day, there were 600 protesters. Not everyone fitted in the lunchroom, so some stood outside. Some white students waved Confederate flags.

A week after the first day of the protest, sit-ins were also happening in places that were twenty to fifty miles away from Greensboro. In the following days, the protesters were growing in number and the protest even crossed state lines. By the end of the month, many places in the South had sit-ins. 70.000 students eventually took part. Many were arrested and many radicalized. All these events took place without texting, Facebook and Twitter.

Nowadays, we are in a so-called revolution. Social media has reinvented social activism. It’s easier for powerless people to collaborate and coordinate together, via social media. In Moldova 2009, ten thousand people took the streets to protest against the regime. Their action was called the Twitter Revolution, because they had been brought together by Twitter. The same thing happened in Tehran (Iran) in the same year. It seems that activists are now defined by their tools. People go on Facebook to push for their rights.

The writer of this text thinks that these are puzzling claims. Some scholars have pointed out that there are only a few twitter accounts in Moldova, and that the significance of Twitter in that country was quite small. Some even say that it wasn’t a revolution, but a stagecraft ordered by the government. Also, there wasn’t a Twitter Revolution in Iran. The ones tweeting about the demonstration were almost all in the West. Some state that the new communication technology is making big claims and producing a false story about the past. They are claiming that communication before television and the Internet has no history and that nothing significant has happened in the area of activism before Internet.

Danger

In the 1960s, it was quit dangerous to protest and not agreeing with the racial rules was often met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the counter in Greensboro stated that they were terrified. On the first day, two police officers were sent to the lunchroom and by the end of the week, a gang of white toughs and the leader of a local Ku Klux Klan showed up and there was even a bomb threat. In Mississippi, white volunteers registered black voters and raised civil-rights awareness. In that time, everyone was told not to go alone anywhere and especially not in a car or at night.

Three white volunteers were kidnapped and killed, 37 black churches were set on fire, safe houses were bombed and volunteers were beaten, shot and arrested. Some people started dropping out of the activism. It seems that activism that attacks deeply rooted problems isn’t that easy.

A sociologist (McAdam) compared the people who stayed and who dropped out of the program. He stated that the difference could be found in the personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to give a list of personal contacts in it turned out that the people who stayed were more likely than dropouts to have a close friend who was also protesting in Mississippi. McAdam stated that high-risk activism is a strong-tie phenomenon. This seems to be the case for many protests throughout history (e.g. East Germany, during the time of the Berlin Wall and mujahedin to Afghanistan). The four young men who sat at the counter in Greensboro, were also really good friends.

Ties

Activism associated with social media isn’t like the activism from history. Social media is built around weak ties. People who follow each other on Twitter may have never met each other. Facebook is a way of keeping up with people you would normally not be able to stay in touch with. In real life you can’t have a 1000 friends, but on Facebook you can. However, this isn’t a bad thing. Weak ties have also strengths. Our acquaintances can be a big source of information and ideas. However, weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism. Weak ties can lead someone you don’t really know do something or your behalf, only if you don’t ask too much of them (no high-risk). You can’t ask someone you barely know to take a financial or personal risk. The big supporters of social media don’t understand the difference in risk. According to the writer, the supporters think that a Facebook friend is the same as a friend in real life and that think that Facebook can move people to do risky things for others. They see the signing of a petition as the same thing as sitting at that lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. Supporters state that social media is effective in increasing motivation, but that’s not true. It’s effective at increasing participation, and that can only be done by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires in the first place. Facebook doesn’t motivate people to make a real sacrifice, but it motivates them to do something that doesn’t require much motivation.

Hierarchical organizations

The civil-right movement of the 1960s could be seen as a campaign. The four young men that took place at the counter were members of the N.A.A.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). That organizations wanted to organize sit-ins at the end of the 1950s. locations were scouted and members were told about other sit-ins. The sit-in movement that spread from Greensboro throughout the South spread only to those cities which already had a pre-existing movement core and trained activists. The civil-right movement was also strategic activism. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization and it had certain operating procedures. Each group of the movement coordinated the activities through authority structures. It seems that traditional activism has a hierarchical organization. Social media activism doesn’t have this. Facebook is for building networks, not hierarchies. Hierarchies have rules and are controlled by a central authority, while networks aren’t controlled. Because of this, networks are resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations.

Also, because they don’t have a centralized leadership structure or real authority, it’s difficult for them to reach consensus and setting goals. Networks can’t really be strategic and conflict and error will eventually arise. An example is Al-Quida. It was a dangerous group when it was a hierarchy, but now it has turned into a network, it is less effective.

These drawbacks don’t matter if the network doesn’t want to be involved in systematic change. Sit-ins are high-risk strategies and there shouldn’t be any chaos or error. Supporters of social media state that it would have been easier for Martin Luther King, Jr. to organize a boycott through social media. But, social media is messy and there isn’t a tight structure. The only thing that Martin Luther King, Jr. needed were strategy and discipline, both that social media couldn’t provide.

Some supporters of social media state that social media provide speed and ease with which a group can be mobilized to fight for a good cause. They see social media as an upgrade for activism. However, the writer of this text doesn’t agree and he states that social media are a form of organizing the weak-tie connections. Unlike traditional activism, it doesn’t promote discipline and strategy, but it promotes resilience and adaptability. Activists can express themselves more easily, but their expressions won’t have that much impact as they would have in the traditional way. Social media are not an enemy of the status quo and if you want real change, you should use other means to your end.