Lehrer shouldn’t be excused for cribbing from himself. But it’s not that surprising that it happened.

“Big ideas” aren’t unlimited

Jonah Lehrer, in the model of fellow New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, is a “big ideas” writer. He writes books that center around a counterintuitive or provocative theme, and explains why things are not as they seem. Books like these are often really popular.

So far, the criticism toward Lehrer has centered around the fact that he copied his own sentences, but copying ideas and themes is also problematic. There is not unlimited material for this kind of pop science writing. It varies in quality, a lot. Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” was better than his later books like “Outliers,” partly because the idea behind “The Tipping Point” was better and the examples were fresher. (Similarly, when Malcolm Gladwell tried to apply the counterintuitive thing to protests in Egypt and Tunisia, people got mad.)

It is tough to come up with new, fresh material that advances a counterintuitive thesis. It’s even tougher to repeatedly come up with those new “wow, I never looked at it that way” ideas. And when you do come up with those ideas, it’s probably more tempting to recycle them.

Writing isn’t public speaking

Authors like Lehrer and Gladwell do a lot of public speaking along with writing gigs. (Here are some of Lehrer’s public appearances.) In public speaking, borrowing from yourself isn’t such a bad thing. Many public speakers recycle material from one presentation to the next. Presumably, they tailor that material depending on whom they’re speaking to, and don’t give the same presentation to the same group twice. (Slate’s Josh Levin points to Malcolm Gladwell’s disclosure about how he handles his obligations to the New Yorker versus his obligations as a public speaker.)

Lehrer’s self-borrowing is easy to discover because he has written for a lot of high-profile publications — Wired, the New Yorker, the New York Times — that attract similar audiences. The examples discovered so far are vivid and memorable — the logic puzzles, the “love making.” That could mean that there is a lot more similar content waiting to be discovered, but it’s clear that Lehrer tends to repeat similar memorable themes. That’s not so bad in his role as a public speaker, but it’s problematic for a journalist.

Lehrer recently did a video interview with GigaOM’s Chris Albrecht. It’s below.

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Ever since the first rock was thrown in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, there has been a debate about how much social media such as Twitter and Facebook had to do with the events that took place there, and the downfall of dictator Hosni Mubarak. Author Malcolm Gladwell in particular has dismissed the impact of these tools several times, saying they are effectively irrelevant in the larger scheme of things when it comes to social activism. But sociologist Zeynep Tufekci disagrees, and she makes a persuasive case in a piece for MIT’s Technology Review that Facebook in particular played a key role in the revolutionary events that have taken place in Egypt and elsewhere.

In Gladwell’s original dismissal of social media’s effects, in a piece in The New Yorker last October, the author contrasted the kind of “real” social activism that occurred during the civil-rights protests over U.S. segregation in the 1960s with the kind of lightweight social impact that Twitter and Facebook have. According to Gladwell, people might be willing to change their location status on Twitter to Tehran in solidarity with dissidents there, or join a Facebook group to raise money for someone needing a bone-marrow transplant, but this is simply “slacktivism” (although he didn’t use that word) and therefore isn’t as meaningful as real-world activism. In the end, Gladwell says:

Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

There is no “online world” vs. “real world”

Gladwell’s central point was that the kind of “weak ties” (as sociologist Mark Granovetter called them) that are developed through social media are not significant enough or powerful enough to affect things in the “real” world — and that Twitter and Facebook are effectively consumed by ephemera and trivialities. But Zeynep Tufekci has made the point before that drawing a distinction between online activity and “real-world” behavior makes less and less sense today, when our online lives are becoming inextricably linked with our offline ones, and that social networks can impact real change.

In Egypt, for example, the seemingly simple (and for Gladwell, effectively meaningless) act of joining a Facebook group devoted to Khaled Said, the Egyptian programmer who was killed by that country’s police forces, helped to turn what was an online protest into a real-world phenomenon that eventually toppled a dictator (something described in a feature in the Technology Review based on interviews with dissidents in Tunisia and Egypt). Did Facebook do this all by itself? Hardly. But Tufekci argues that it clearly played a crucial role in creating what she calls a “collective action/information cascade” that drove the protests out of the online world and into the “real” one.

How did it do this? According to Tufekci, who has made a study of dissident activity in countries like Egypt, there is often a kind of sociological logjam that prevents real revolution from occurring in such societies, where any kind of political action could be met by detainment or even death. Because the costs of dissent are so large, there is a “collective action problem” that is similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma in game theory — no one wants to take action by themselves because of the consequences, but since there is no way to be sure that anyone else is going to join them, revolution becomes a stalemate. As she puts it:

Collective action problems are hardest to crack if it’s difficult for citizens to coordinate and communicate. Indeed, game-theorists have long known that communication between participants dramatically alters the dynamics of these “dilemmas” which appear rigged against the interests of the individuals.

Social media helps build social momentum

What social media such as Facebook does, Tufekci argues, is to create a sense of a larger community around such issues (something we have argued is the power of real-time social networks). If thousands of people join a Facebook page for Khaled Said, in other words — something that is far from a meaningless act in a country like Egypt, thanks in part to Facebook’s “real name” policies and the fact that police forces can and do track dissidents through such networks — it shows others that there is a groundswell of revolutionary feeling, and that can help tip things over from simple online community-building into “real world” activism.

It is in this context Facebook “likes” of dissident pages such as “We are All Khaled Said,” sharing of videos of regime brutality, online expressions of political anger, and acceptances of Facebook “invitations” to protest all matter as they help build a visible momentum which, itself, is a condition of success.

What’s always been surprising to me, ever since Malcolm Gladwell started trying to minimize the impact of social media on revolution, is that what Tufekci and others have described fits almost exactly with the concept of a “tipping point,” which the New Yorker writer so famously laid out in his book of the same name. If anyone is equipped to grasp the idea of collective action occurring based on a build-up of small events and seemingly innocuous connections, shouldn’t it be Gladwell?

For whatever reason, however, the author has continued to downplay the idea that social-media activity can be a necessary part — or even an important part — of real revolution or social activism. But Tufekci makes a strong case that what she calls the “new media ecology” created by Facebook and Twitter and other real-time information networks is a game-changer for social activism. And not only that, she notes that understanding how collective action works in such situations is important because “the most crucial problems humanity faces are collective action problems [ranging from] from the health of our democracies to global warming, from financial and asset bubbles to social unrest.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Richard Engel, NBC and Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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Alexander Lukashenko is no fan of the internet. True, the President of Belarus, widely seen as the last remaining dictator in Europe, dislikes many things — democratic opposition, for one. But he reserves a special place for the Web. In the past he’s railed against the “anarchy” of the Internet. More recently The Economist reported that his attitude towards the rebels of the online world leans on familiar stereotypes — he described Internet users as nothing more than deluded teenage rebels: “16 or 17 years old, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a girl under his left arm”.

This weekend, however, Lukashenko took things a step further by cracking down on protesters who organized themselves online, and pushing his statewide ban on Facebook, Twitter and the popular Russian social networking site Vkontakte. Why? Because he is worried that young people are using it to try and give momentum to their political protests. Claiming that opposition to his regime is being run by foreign countries, he told AFP that the opposition in Minsk “is using social networks to call for strikes. I will watch and observe — and then whack them in such a way that they won’t even have time to run across the border.”

This marks another interesting point in the seemingly endless conversation about how social media and political activism work together. You might remember how Malcolm Gladwell, famously, kicked off a huge debate when he argued that the ability of Facebook or Twitter (or any other Internet service) to power a revolution is vastly over-represented. He suggested that social media “makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact”. Plenty of people disagreed, and as the “Arab Spring” got underway, it seemed as if the pendulum might swing in the other direction: Egypt turned off the Internet, Tunisian bloggers found places in government and protesters even named their children after websites.

All the way along, our own Mathew Ingram has painstakingly detailed the arguments over social media and activism.

In the end, though, I think Lukashenko’s moves to block Facebook, Twitter and VKontakte tells us something different. Understanding how social media might foment social unrest is interesting, but things are more complex than the back-and-forth would suggest — because for all of that arguing, whether or not social media can cause revolutions doesn’t matter if everyone in a position of power treats it like it does.

Whether it’s Belarus shutting down access in a fit of paranoia, or Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak hitting the kill switch in an attempt to prop up his failing regime, the possibility of organization taking place on the Internet is as much — or more — of a threat as the reality. As we see action become increasingly pre-emptive (the chosen method of protest against Lukashenko’? clapping), we see the shift take place.

The added twist, of course, is that most of these dictators see the use of social networking as a proxy for American intervention. Lukashenko’s people were quick to put forward the theory that these online protests were somehow linked to a visit to neighboring Lithuania by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And while that might seem like mere delusion, there’s evidence to suggest it has some truth to it: Clinton was visiting Eastern Europe to promote a Tech Camp that “teaches activists web savvy” and “subversion”. She explicitly called out Belarus while she was there, and the Moscow Times quoted a Belarusian activist who had attended the camp “to learn how to keep his group safe online when it uses social media to organize protests at home”.

This is all sides — or at least all the ones who matter — treating social media as a truly disruptive, revolutionary force. And this is what Alec Ross, one of Clinton’s advisers, meant when he said the Internet was the Che Guevara of the 21st century.

Even the services themselves admit that they are being used in this way: Alexis Madrigal recently noted how Twitter’s Biz Stone seemed ambivalent about the service’s relationship with the US government:

The thing we’re facing now is that, you know, the State Department is suddenly really cozy with Twitter because they’re like “Oh wow, we were trying to get this done with AK-47s and you guys got it done with Tweets. Can we be friends?”

But I maintain that it has to be a neutral technology because there are different forms of democracy. You don’t want your technology, you don’t want Twitter, to look like it’s simply a tool for spreading U.S. democracy around the world. You want it to help but you don’t want it to look like you’re in the pocket of the U.S. government. So we try to speak out and say that they have no access to our decision-making.

But it seems he’s already too late. Twitter’s now part of the U.S. government’s narrative, which means social media is part of the geopolitical story all over the world; and when the White House says social media can have an impact, people begin to think it can have an impact. That in turn means it starts to have an impact (even in an indirect sense) which leads the White House to say it’s having an impact. It’s turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s fitting that we’re discussing this on the 4th of July, since the real fear of dictatorships is that the Internet is ultimately a way of America using soft power. In the minds of dictators like Lukashenko, the Internet has the ability to make everyone an American — subject to the same cultural beliefs, the same politics, the same rights. That’s something they are terrified by. And that means that the question now isn’t whether social media can start a revolution, but whether dictators believe it can.

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Author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell caused some controversy last year when he said social-media tools like Twitter aren’t worth much as a tool for social activism (or at least not “real” social activism). After the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — both of which involved extensive use of Twitter and Facebook by demonstrators — many wondered whether Gladwell would alter this stance based on some powerful evidence to the contrary. The author made it clear in a recent interview with CNN, however, that he still doesn’t think such tools amount to much.

In the interview (there’s a full transcript here), Gladwell says Twitter and Facebook may have been used by demonstrators to communicate during the recent uprisings in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, but it isn’t clear they were crucial in any way to the revolutions there. Gladwell goes on to argue that other similar events have taken place in the past — including the demonstrations in East Germany that eventually led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall — and they didn’t require any such tools:

I mean, in cases where there are no tools of communication, people still get together. So I don’t see that as being… in looking at history, I don’t see the absence of efficient tools of communication as being a limiting factor on the ability of people to socially organize.

This is the same point Gladwell made in a short note about Egypt he posted at the New Yorker site in February, in which he wrote, “people protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.” As more than one observer has pointed out, this isn’t much of an argument. There were political uprisings before guns and tanks came along too, but no one would deny that guns and tanks changed the nature of social revolutions considerably. In a message posted on Twitter, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci called arguments about how revolutions occurred before X or Y was invented “intellectually lazy.”

In the CNN interview, Gladwell also argues that social media and other such tools can just as easily be used dictators and governments to crack down on revolutions:

[Y]ou could also make the opposite argument that some of these new technologies offer dictators a … give them the potential to crackdown in ways they couldn’t crackdown before. So, my point is that for everything that looks like it’s a step forward, there’s another thing which says, well, actually, you know, there was a cost involved.

This might as well be called the Morozov principle, since it’s a cornerstone of political writer Evgeny Morozov’s argument. In Morozov’s book Net Delusion and in his columns at Foreign Policy magazine and elsewhere, he argues that the Internet is as much of a danger to social movements as it is a benefit, because (for example) government forces can monitor Facebook to see what demonstrators are up to, and track their movements using Twitter and other social tools. (Morozov is also on record as being skeptical of how much these tools have influenced the revolutions in the Arab world.)

But even this argument acknowledges that social-media tools have changed the nature of social activism in significant ways. They may not be 100-percent beneficial, as Morozov alleges some “cyber-utopians” believe, but they clearly have altered the landscape — and in many cases this appears to have tipped incipient revolutions in places such as Tunisia and Egypt over into real-world uprisings, something that you might expect would interest Gladwell, the author of the much-hyped book The Tipping Point.

For whatever reason, however, the New Yorker author seems determined to downplay the effect social media has in such situations, despite the growing evidence to the contrary. Gladwell’s full interview with CNN is embedded below.

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New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell’s erudite skewering of various cultural phenomena, something he has become famous (or possibly infamous) for, tends to produce a strong reaction in those who are close to the topics he takes on, and his recent analysis of Twitter and its potential uses as a tool for social activism is no exception. In the several weeks since he wrote the original piece, over half a dozen essays and blog posts from a variety of sources have come out arguing that he is wrong, and today, The Atlantic magazine joined the fray with a guest essay by none other than Twitter co-founder Biz Stone that took issue with his conclusions. (The title of this post comes from a message that Stone posted to Twitter about his essay.)

Gladwell’s article was entitled “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” and started with an evocative image: a group of black college students holding a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. in 1960, to protest racism: an event that triggered subsequent rallies and demonstrations throughout the southern U.S. All this, Gladwell says, “happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.” The author then goes on to puncture the conventional wisdom that Twitter had anything much to do with revolutions in Moldova or Iran, and says that “fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

The New Yorker writer’s point is clear: real activism involves sit-ins and getting shot at, not sitting at a keyboard posting things on Twitter or text messaging. It’s hard to disagree with this; no one would argue that posting a comment to Twitter while sipping a latte at Starbucks is activism, simply because you happen to use the #iran hashtag. But is Gladwell making a fair comparison? I don’t think so. As other critics such as Anil Dash have also argued, setting up a contrast between Twitter and anti-racism demonstrations in the 1960s is effectively a straw-man argument, which allows the author to slam the social network for not doing things that no one has ever really claimed it was trying to do.

One of Gladwell’s central arguments is that Twitter and other social media tools emphasize — and are powered by — what sociologists call “weak ties” between individuals (a term coined by Mark Granovetter): that is, the kind of ties that you have to your co-workers, or friends from high school, or people who belong to the same clubs as you. Gladwell says that real activism only occurs as a result of strong ties, the kind that people have to their churches, their families, and to strong leaders, and that real revolutions require a hierarchy that is antithetical to social media like Twitter. In his Atlantic essay, Biz Stone says: “Gladwell is wrong. Big change can come in small packages too” (Stone and co-founder Ev Williams made similar points in a recent Q & A discussion).

By that, the Twitter founder means that even weak ties can help pull people together around causes in ways that matter. He uses several examples, including the case of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident who is in prison for writing about human rights, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Has Twitter led to his release? No. But as Stone argues, it has given Chinese citizens a way of talking about him, something that they would otherwise not have done — as described in a recent blog post by Hu Yong, a professor of Internet studies at Peking University. Yong said Twitter was “the only place where people can talk freely” about Liu and his ideas, and that it has become “a powerful tool for Chinese citizens.” Burmese democracy fighter Aung San Suu Kyi, imprisoned for more than 15 years, has said when she is released one of the first things she wants to do is get a Twitter account so she can communicate with her supporters.

In her response to Gladwell’s piece, author Maria Popova describes several cases in which Facebook helped spark “real” social activism, including public protests in Colombia in 2008 that saw close to 5 million people participate in protests against the country’s armed forces, and a campaign in Bulgaria in 2009 that resulted in the largest public protests since the fall of communism, and led to the resignation of several Parliament members. As others have noted in their criticisms, Gladwell seems to see activism as an either-or proposition: Either you use social media, in which case it’s ineffective and useless, or you gather in the streets and do real activism. But wouldn’t some of those demonstrators in 1960 have loved to have better ways of getting their message out to as many people as possible?

While I was reading Gladwell’s piece, in my head I replaced any mention of Twitter or Facebook with the words “the telephone,” and then it became a diatribe about how people talking on the telephone has never amounted to anything in terms of social activism. That is probably just as true as his criticisms of Twitter. But would any modern social effort or campaign or demonstration be effective without someone making phone calls? Twitter and Facebook are just tools, and they can be used for social good in the same way any other tool can. And those “weak ties” can eventually grow into strong ones.

As Stone notes at the end of his essay: “Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one — suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal.” And that is a positive thing for social change, not a negative one.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users PopTech and David Reece

Stone said he could see validity in Gladwell’s point that effecting meaningful and sustained social change requires strong relationships and hierarchical structure. But he added,

The real-time exchange of information — a service like Twitter — it would be absurd to think it’s not complementary to activism. When it really comes down to it, it’s not going to be technology that’s going to be the agent of change. It’s going to be people; it’s going to be humanity.

Williams, for his part, said of the Gladwell article, “It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable. He pointed out that you don’t ever get much of anything done by just telling people you’re going to do it; you actually have to do it.

Twitter's Biz Stone and Evan Williams

“Anyone who’s claiming that sending a tweet by itself is activism, that’s ludicrous — but no one’s claiming that, at least no one that’s credible,” said Williams, who stepped down as Twitter CEO last week to focus on product and cede the role to more of a manager and business operator, former Twitter COO Dick Costolo.

“If you can’t organize you can’t activate,” Williams said, criticizing Gladwell for at one point conflating the editability of Wikipedia with Twitter. “I thought [the article] was entertaining but kind of pointless.”

Stone (at this point basically piling on) said he gave Gladwell props for mounting an argument against Twitter. “He could have stuck to email and texting,” Stone pointed out, which probably wouldn’t have instigated nearly such a large and viral discussion of the article.

The Twitter guys said they don’t want to take as much credit as some people have offered them for playing a role in catalyzing the Iranian election protests last year. Even though Twitter may have had little to do with actual citizen organization in Iran, it helped bring global attention to the events, they said. Williams disclosed that #iranelection was Twitter’s No. 1 trending topic in all of 2009.

As another example of Twitter being applied for social good, Stone brought up usage of Twitter after the Haiti earthquake in January, which included emergency services coordination but also was a major driver of publicity for text-message donation campaigns that generated record contributions.

Other tidbits from this Twitter founders’ conversation with BusinessWeek’s Brad Stone:

• Williams pointed out that his new product role is his fourth position at Twitter (in as many years). He said of promoting Costolo, “I thought I could be more useful doing that role, and Dick could do my role better.”
• Biz Stone said that Twitter doesn’t have too much of a problem with censoring pornographic tweets. “It’s hard to get super porny in 140 characters,” he said, joking, “That ASCII art is going to have to be pretty sophisticated.”
• Twitter is not prioritizing making its service available in China, where it is currently blocked: “China’s very big but there’s lots to do in the rest of the world,” said Williams.
• Like Facebook expects to hit 1 billion users, Williams said Twitter will get to 1 billion members too. Biz Stone added “Not the same billion.” Brad Stone asked when. Williams replied “In the future.”
• Williams said that he thinks an interesting and unexploited use of Twitter would be to create an account that “just retweets other tweets” on a topic, like the best of San Francisco or baseball. Not everyone has to produce content, he said; you can also help curate and spread good stuff.

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Image courtesy Flickr user evhead.

Like so many other industries, early attempts at delivering online education have generally consisted of making available the same content that’s found offline. While this is a good start, the key to online education is amplifying the way in which we learn when we’re at school — from our peers.

Modeling Agencies vs. the U.S. Marine Corps

Malcolm Gladwell in 2005 wrote an entertaining piece in The New Yorker entitled “Getting In” that distinguishes between institutions that select and promote (modeling agencies) from those that improve (the Marines):

Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modeling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful.

At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide.

Gladwell goes on to suggest that perhaps the Ivy League resembles a modeling agency more than it does The Marine Corps. But rather than take on that debate here and now, let’s instead focus on the objective of making online education improve anyone with the interest to learn — that is, on treatment effects.

How Important Are Great Teachers?

Everyone has had a teacher who’s made a difference in his or her life.  But of all the teachers, professors and tutors you’ve had, how many were great?  In an informal survey of my friends about their collective 80-plus teachers from grade school through college, the average number of “great teachers” was three. That’s 3.8 percent.  Even if I take K-8 out and evaluate high school through college, the great teacher percentage barely breaks 5 percent.  And many of these teachers were considered great because of the personal attention they gave individual students, so bringing them to the masses would likely take away from some of their greatness.

We should absolutely find and reward great teachers, but I suspect that the key to expanding education to everyone is by changing the definition of “teacher.” When I asked those same people how they learned, they all mentioned peers — other students; study group members and project or lab team members; fraternity brothers; tutors; siblings and parents.

The Socratic Method

Harvard Business School teaches nearly every class with the case study method, itself a form of the Socratic Method.  Students are given a case to study prior to class and the professor acts as a moderator for the discussion. I found the strategy to be very effective; the diverse background and experience of students in the class makes the discussion especially rich and interesting.

Each class kicks off with a cold call, and everyone is at risk of being asked to start off the case. If you blow a cold call, your grade suffers significantly and so does your reputation — great incentives to do your work every night. More broadly, that’s one of the things that differentiates being in school vs. watching MIT videos online. In order to bring elite education online, there must be a similarly strong incentive system.

After the chosen student opens the case, the rest are permitted to begin a debate.  Students are rewarded not only for providing well thought-out arguments, but for offering differing opinions. This debate stimulates a student’s brain in a way that a lecture, reading or watching a video simply does not. If you measured the average heart rate of a student in a lecture vs. a Socratic Method alternative, I have no doubt that you would see a significant difference. I don’t know the physiology behind why this may make your brain more likely to engage in learning, but it does. In a big way.

My best teachers have always approached education with a form of the Socratic Method. They understand that telling someone the answer rarely imparts knowledge about anything other than the lecturer’s intellect.

What Does All This Mean for Online Education?

Online communities can be deployed to deliver peer-to-peer education in a way that is far superior to anything else that exists online today. Using some form of community-driven Socratic Method, strong incentives beyond self-edification, and a way to measure and certify knowledge, online education will be able to deliver an Ivy League-quality education to anyone with the desire to learn.

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