Social Movement Draft – Dr. Eric Drown

To start a social movement at UNE we need all three components of social change which is strong ties, weak ties, and social habits which kind of ties in with weak ties. You need all these concepts for a successful social change because it’s like a yin yang you can’t have the good without the bad. And that’s exactly what strong tie and weak ties are. Strong ties are when you have good friends in different groups no matter their race or type of income you have. Either way if you were in trouble or needed help, they would help you because they felt obligated to help a friend out. However, having a strong tie of friends doesn’t help change the world alone. That’s when weak ties come in because weak ties are acquaintances of friends from different groups and sometimes even people you don’t even know completely but that kind of ties into social habits too. Having weak ties causes a social peer pressure towards people to make them feel obligated to help because everyone else is doing it. This also falls into social habits because people will feel pressure to join even if they don’t want to because of the risk of losing their social standing. All these concept especially strong ties and weak ties help create a successful social change. By having strong ties start the movement, weak ties grow the movement, and social habits enduring the movement are all key components. Without these a movement will fail every time. This opens up a varity of people who want to be apart of this movement to bring awareness or to make a serious change. A prime example of trying to make a change is Kyle Korver who write an essay using strong ties when he wants to help make a change for not only his friend Thabo but for the whole black community. The weak ties starts to fall into affect when Korver explains how when ever people think of Klye Korver’s name he wants them to know that he supports the black community. This is a weak tie because when ever there is a fan of Korvers and they see that he supports the black community they might too. Also, to give you a visual on a social change actually working Rosa Parks is a great example of starting a successful social change just by staying in her seat when she was told to get up. Now every one knows the whole bus situation with Rosa Parks. However, Parks was not the only African American who was arrest for sitting on the bus. There were many more but they never started a social change movement like how Rosa Parks did because they didn’t have strong ties and weak ties. Rosa Parks was well invest into her community and let’s just say the cops arrested the “wrong” black person that day because that arrest lead to a change for the better.