Linux, Lunch Counters, and Lost Cell Phones: Gladwell versus Shirky

Photo by Adam Fagen of Display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History - http://www.flickr.com/photos/afagen/3155132290/

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker this week: “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” is a really compelling read, and a nice antidote to technological determinism in our understanding of social meda (the idea that the new technologies shape behavior and determine outcomes rather than interacting with behavior and both shaping and being shaped by the interaction) but ultimately I think he gets it wrong. Gladwell represents networks of weak ties as an absence of organization incapable of achieving meaningful change, and mistakes what has been done via Twitter and Facebook for all that social media and free/open source approaches could be capable of.

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