User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/gladwell/

Abstract

Malcolm Gladwell: Small Change. Why the revolution will not be tweeted. In: The New Yorker, October 4, 2010.

1. Social media can't provide what social change has always required.

1. Case study: Greensboro sit-ins (1960)

– Four college students sat at the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The seats were recerved for whites. Although they were refused service, they were allowed to stay at the counter. During the following days other students joined in until the number of protesters swelled to six hundred. – Sit-ins, as strategy of nonviolent resistance during the African-American Civil Rights Movement, spread throughout the South. Described as a "[…]fever. Everyone wanted to go." (Michael Walzer) Some 17.000 students eventually took part. – Events happened without email, texting, Facbook, or Twitter.

1. New tools of social media

New tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With social media the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.

1. Case study: Moldova (2009)

– Protest against the country's Communist government. – Demonstrators had been brought together by Twitter ("Twitter Revolution").

1. Case study: Tehran (2009)

– Twitter empowered people to "stand up for freedom and democracy" (Mark Pfeifer). – Twitter was asked to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Website, because tool shouldn't be out of service at the height of the demonstrations.

1. James K. Glassman: Sites like Facebook "give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was 'eating our lunch on the Internet'. That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation."