Social Media: Small Change or Big deal?
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Small Change
At 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. “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.
Answer to "Small Change"
Kashmir protesters are using social media to disseminate news and views. Photograph: Dar Yasin/AP For a man who has devoted a significant part of his life to documenting "how little things can make a big difference", Malcolm Gladwell is surprisingly dismissive of the power of social networking to effect change.
The New Yorker recently published a thoughtfully written article by Malcolm Gladwell titled, " Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted ." Citing research done by Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam, Mr. Gladwell compares what he sees happening today among people connected by modern social media to the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Biz Stone's Answer
Twitter Founders: Gladwell Got It Wrong
“Laughable,” “absurd,” “ludicrous” and “pointless” were words Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone used Monday night to describe a recent Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about the futility of social media to create real social change. Of course, you wouldn’t expect those two to agree with Gladwell’s thesis, but they offered valid critiques while speaking at an event for the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. 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,
My thoughts Part 1
Malcom Gladwell’s article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted,” was forwarded to me by at least half-a-dozen colleagues after it was published just three days ago. I have purposefully not read other people’s responses to this piece so that I could write down my own observations before being swayed by those of others. So what do I think? Finally, someone else is calling attention to the importance of civil resistance (strategic nonviolent action) in the context of new digital technologies!The first part of my response to Gladwell’s article in The New Yorker explained why principles, strategies and tactics of civil resistance are important for the future of digital activism. In this second part, I address Gladwell’s arguments on high vs. low risk activism, weak vs. strong ties and hierarchies vs networks. According to Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam , the civil rights movement represented “high-risk activism” which requires “strong-ties”. By strong-ties, McAdam refers to the bonds of friendship, family, relationships, etc. These social ties appear to be a necessary condition for recruiting and catalyzing a movement engaged in high-risk activism. “What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement.”
My thoughts Part 2
French analysis
Avez-vous lu le dernier papier de Malcolm Gladwell ? Si vous ne l’avez pas fait, c’est un peu comme si vous pensiez que MySpace est à la mode. Vous êtes déjà TRÈS en retard. Comme la plupart des lecteurs de ce blog n’ont pas nécessairement le temps, ou la motivation de se coller les centaines de lignes de l’article, je vous propose une petite analyse. Pour Gladwell, l’engagement social, l’activisme sur les médias sociaux est une légende. C’est un truc qui n’existe pas, pour une simple et bonne raison: Notre Web social est essentiellement composé de connexions dites faibles : des personnes que l’on aurait du mal à considérer comme des amis, des gens éloignés physiquement, et toute personne ne faisant pas réellement partie de nos sphères intimes.Does Egypt Need Twitter?
When Mao famously said that power springs from the barrel of a gun, it was assumed that he was talking about guns. There wasn’t much interest at the time in how he chose to communicate that sentiment: whether he said it in a speech, say, or whispered it to a friend, or wrote it in his diary or published it in a book. That would never happen today, of course. We now believe that the “how” of a communicative act is of huge importance. We would say that Mao posted that power comes from the barrel of a gun on his Facebook page, or we would say that he blogged about gun barrels on Tumblr—and eventually, as the apostles of new media wrestled with the implications of his comments, the verb would come to completely overcome the noun, the part about the gun would be forgotten, and the the big takeaway would be: Whoa.
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Social Media? Not a Big Deal
Malcolm Gladwell: Social Media Still Not a Big Deal
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.
Response Do the tools of social media make it possible for protesters to challenge their governments? Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is no evidence that they do; Clay Shirky disagrees. Snapshot The rapid rise in popularity of social media outlets such as Twitter have led many to argue that people around the world are connecting in unprecedented ways. Parsing the data, however, reveals that isn't true.