Apples and Oranges, Classical and Jazz

Imagine my excitement when I saw that we'd be reading an article by Malcolm Gladwell of Outliers and The Tipping Point fame for our class, the same author who kept boredom at bay for me many a time in many an airport. I hold Malcolm Gladwell in the highest esteem and wouldn't hesitate to call him a genius, which is an overused word to be sure. That being said, I was disappointed in his The New Yorker article "Small Change".

"The revolution will not be tweeted!" Gladwell claims, playing with the great Gil Scott-Heron line. To summarize, Gladwell rails against the "weak ties" of social media by comparing their potential to the African-American civil rights movement that had no such technology to hold it together. Here's the problem with Gladwell's article: he spends the whole article talking about how good brocoli is for you. Does that mean no one should eat any other food but brocoli?

The worst part about being disappointed in Gladwell's article: I actually agree with him. Twitter is not going to replace "proper" activism and weak ties don't trump strong ones. I don't think anyone is trying to put down the civil rights movement by saying Twitterized activism is somehow better. It's a tool to help spread awareness and that is never a bad thing. It doesn't solve the problem by itself (like KONY 2012 and similar mimimal investment causes as someone mentioned), but it isn't meant to. Social media is complementary to traditional activism. It hasn't erased it! Just as Sullivan said in his article on blogging, jazz is not a replacement for classical!

Is a person of today's drive to activism sated by social media, allowing people to think they've done all they can without having left their computers? Gladwell seemed to support that claim. I believe I have evidence to the contrary, which appeared almost exactly a year after Gladwell's October 2010 article: Occupy Wall Street. Whether or not one agrees with the Occupy ideology, it is undeniable that they performed a traditional form of activism that was augmented by social media. Activism isn't dead and it continues online and off.