Fire With Water

Social Media: Rockin' or Irrelevant?

A year ago, Malcolm Gladwell (of the New Yorker) and Clay Shirkey (an NYU professor) engaged in an epic debate about whether twitter, facebook, and other social media live up to the hype of their role in protests and activism.

Gladwell was all like “No way, close personal ties are what make people committed activists, and you’re not besties with your tweeps! Those revolutions would probs have gone down just the same even if social media didn’t exist.”

But then Shirky was like, “Look, Malcolm, the armchair slacktivists were never gonna really protest regardless, but social media have totes allowed the real protesters to develop new, crucial strategies.”

And then this dude Bill Wasik wrote an article about it a year later judging them. He was like “I’m taking Gladwell’s side. Though they communicated electronically, their friendships, not the media by which they developed them, are what’s important. Check out this baller study of the civil rights movement: activists who listed other activists as personal contacts were more likely to persevere.”

And then I linked to it and paraphrased them with Valley Girl accents. Good times.  

But what he forgot to account for is that, obvi, national and international attention/accountability does (sometimes) make dictators more hesitant to turn violent against dissidents. Youtube videos taken by camera phones and shared on facebook, twitter, and tumblr revealed police brutality that otherwise probs would have gone down with impunity. There was even that incident with the Egyptians catching the eye-shooting officer because of a video and screen grabs shared on social media. Not to mention that in a protest like Occupy (or the Keystone XL protests in which your truly was arrested), one of the major goals is to change public opinion and raise awareness. Maybe you’re not gonna get people willing to be arrested with you from a facebook post, but you will start a discussion with people you’d never see in person or mention it to on the phone. And that totes makes a diff.