I thought I was seeing all these Egypt Twitter stories because I get most of my news through nerd-channels like news.yc, but I s'pose they've invaded mainstream coverage as well.

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.