Small Change

At the end of September, Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and author of The Tipping blockage and Blink, published a piece, Small Change Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted, in that magazine making the argument that social media tools resembling Facebook and Twitter were overhyped as agents of social interpolate at best and at worst, completely useless in helping move the kind of high-risk actions that be strong enough to bring down governments and change cultures. Using the wave of sit-ins that swept the South in 1960 during the Civil Rights Movement as his prime example, Gladwell rests his dissertation upon two points.First, movements and high-risk socio-political actions are carried out by people who have strong ties to each other or a strong level of allegiance to the movement itself and the actions they undertake serve to reinforce those ties. Second, the momentum and strategic direction of movements requires some level of hierarchy and organiz ation so the energy has a go on of winning the kinds of change the split upicipants want to see. Given these two requisites for large-scale social change, he says, there is no way that social networks will 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 state-of-the-art social change in the America. Some of it was the usual triumphalism of the tech geek. Some of it was an interesting mix of old guys weart get it and its not the 60s anymore so dont expect change to look like it did 50 days 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 public policy climate of the Unit ed 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 progressive organizations are fighting for and winning progressive change using organizing methodologies that deploy Twitter and Facebook as tools in a tactical arsenal that increasingly includes a dizzying array of options.