Malcom Gladwell: Does Egypt Need Twitter?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I am not convinced this is true: by lowering the friction of communication by making it real-time and instantaneous.
I'm an English grad student, and I'm reminded of some of the arguments in the field around the development of the novel as a genre (to see one such argument: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/28/the-novel-an-alternative-hist... ). Basically, a lot of people want to argue about the development of the novel without taking into account the printing press. To me, this is silly, because mass cheap printing was a precondition to the novel as we know it. Without that, we would have fictional prose narratives of some length, but we probably wouldn't have them alluding to one another, we wouldn't have large portions of the population reading them, and we wouldn't have (relatively) large portions of the population with enough disposable income to avoid them. If you look at surviving works prior to ~1600, almost all of them are religious in nature because only the church had the resources to fund writing, maintain large collections of writing, and bother writing anything down.
After ~1600 (or ~1500, if you prefer, but that's about it), you have a lot of things written that would previously not have been considered "worth" writing down because writing and copying manuscripts was so expensive and time consuming. Technology did change what was said. How something was said changed what was said. Technology is doing the same thing now.
Gladwell is right in one sense: the media is probably overstating the importance of Twitter and SMS. But both of those still play an important role in what's going on. Somehow, people with grievances against monarchs and dictators weren't all that successful on average in the years prior to ~1600. After that, they got more and more successful, to the point where a fair bit of world's population now lives without dictators. Part of the reason is because ideas about freedom and good governance could be disseminated cheaply, where before they couldn't, and everyone spent most waking hours covered in shit, farming, and hoping they're not going to starve to death in late winter / early spring.
Within the sea of triviality and banality there are nuggets of profundity. More than that there is meta-contextual information that can be important and profound as well, leading to the formation of a zeitgeist, which can solidify further into outright culture.
So yes, twitter, on average, is not terribly interesting or profound. No more so than an average telephone conversation or even the average news paper article or book. But as a whole it is no less profound than literature or the press.
Yes, revolutions will come and go with or without twitter, but to ignore the massive multiplier effect that viral social media has in situations such as this is ludicrous ... the fact that this is coming from the man who wrote 'The Tipping Point' is especially ironic.
Now, let's remove Twitter and the media completely.
What do we get? So we had a revolution in Tunisia that was very well televised and communicated.
Remove the modern means of communication and media and Egyptians would have no where as much of an idea or source of inspiration, certainly not within days of the Tunisian revolution.
You can always retort that without mediums such as twitter news would still spread even if at a slower pace. And similarly, a revolution would also occur even if at a slower pace.
Then the pace at which a revolution is occurring becomes a major point of contention in this debate. I'd argue that twitter, cell phones etc. have significantly increased pace of communication and thus the time to revolution. To, then, belittle them is like saying who needs cars when we could still WALK 5 miles; it'd just take longer. A lot longer.
I can't summarise it anywhere as well as this link can:
http://www.amazon.com/Net-Delusion-Dark-Internet-Freedom/dp/...
If you believe that technology is inherently ethically neutral or that the use of social networks will necessarily produce a net-increase in democracy or freedom, perhaps it's worth reading for some balance.
Don't read everything you believe.
I had to unfollow a bunch of people on Twitter because they kept posting articles and blogs about how technology was being used to "help the plight of the Egyptians". You know, rather than articles about the plight itself.
As for Gladwell, I believe it's just too easy to take shots at "Social Media" in general when clearly nothing can be proven. To me the mere fact that actual people believe in it and feel helped and moved by it, constitutes enough evidence of real value. Whether it makes a measurable difference in the outcome of the Egyptian crisis is something that cannot really be proved one way or the other and to me it almost feels like Gladwell wants to somehow draw attention by arguing the point, which he already had taken on in a back-and-forth argument with Clay Shirky some months ago.
Edited to add: That Egypt's government felt compelled to censor the Internet and the use of SMS messaging is also powerful evidence of the value of these ways of communication.
My initial reaction is to agree with Gladwell, even to go further: I want to say that what we're doing when we focus on the "how" instead of the "what" in stories of modern mass communication is fetishizing indisputably "authentic" uses of technologies whose trivializing influence we fear or are at least insecure about.
But new platforms like Twitter could plausibly be changing the dynamics of political revolutions (etc.) in such significant ways that it really is worth talking about above and beyond the ground-level facts of the stories themselves.
I think Gladwell's just exhausted by the conversation.
But it does help.
Getting source material for a story is very easy and very cheap, this increases their margins as opposed to paying a correspondent and crew which is very expensive.
Also, talking about social media allows an uninformed and uninterested western audience to relate to the events in a far away place. This increases the potential market of the story.
News is a business, stories are their product.