Small Change

At the end of September, Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for the forward-looking Yorker powder magazine and author of The Tipping Point and Blink, published a piece, Small transmute Why the Revolution Will non be Tweeted, in that magazine making the argument that mixer media tools like Facebook and chirrup were overhyped as agents of social change at best and at worst, completely recitationless in helping move the kind of high-risk actions that are pie-eyed teeming to bring down governments and change cultures. Using the wave of sit-ins that swept the reciprocal ohm in 1960 during the Civil Rights Movement as his prime example, Gladwell rests his thesis upon cardinal points.First, movements and high-risk socio-political actions are carried out by people who hand strong ties to each other or a strong level of cargo to the movement itself and the actions they undertake serve to reinforce those ties. Second, the momentum and strategic precaution of movements requires some level of hierarchy and organization so the energy has a chance of winning the kinds of change the participants want to see. Given these two requisites for big social change, he says, there is no way that social networks allow for actually be able to play a role in amplifying or directing social change.This essay engendered a firestorm of criticism from activists who use Facebook and Twitter as part of their daily work in organizing for advanced social change in the America. rough of it was the usual triumphalism of the tech geek. Some of it was an interesting mix of old guys dont get it and its not the 60s anymore so dont wear change to look like it did 50 years ago. none of these responses dealt at all with the main points of his thesis, strong-ties and the primacy of closed, hierarchical organizations.However, an increasing number of responses have tackled those issues and done it from the point of view of activists and organizers working hard to change the humans policy cli mate of the United States. These responses range from top-level examination of how Gladwell positions his understanding of Twitter and Facebook within his own thesis on ties and hierarchy to nuts-and-bolts examinations of how modern innovative organizations are fighting for and winning progressive change using organizing methodologies that deploy Twitter and Facebook as tools in a tactical arsenal that progressively includes a dizzying array of options.