Onward!
Biz Stone and Chris Hughes recently took different and equally valid routes towards the very reasonable conclusion that Malcolm Gladwell is a stooge, but I think one important point went unsaid: social media emerged as a powerful tool in the activist’s toolbox at the same time that it highlighted certain infuriating shortcomings, since while on the one hand it empowers activists and organizers in manifold new ways it also provides an undue and aggravating amount of visibility to people who confuse tinting an avatar green with good old fashioned actually giving a fuck.
And yet the greatest failure of social media would simply be a failure of imagination: Gladwell surveyed the current landscape and resigned himself to believing that everyone changing their Twitter locations to Tehran is the best we can do, while the actual visionaries in the space looked at the same landscape and saw a massive segment of the population that had just been engaged for the very first time, just taken its very first step—and then promptly got started building the tools that will enable the next step.
