

Malcom Gladwell: Does Egypt Need Twitter? - hornokplease
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html

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jseliger
_"People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each
other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they
were driven to do it in the first place."_

I am not convinced this is true: by lowering the friction of communication by
making it real-time and instantaneous.

I'm an English grad student, and I'm reminded of some of the arguments in the
field around the development of the novel as a genre (to see one such
argument: [http://jseliger.com/2010/09/28/the-novel-an-alternative-
hist...](http://jseliger.com/2010/09/28/the-novel-an-alternative-history-
steven-moore) ). Basically, a lot of people want to argue about the
development of the novel without taking into account the printing press. To
me, this is silly, because mass cheap printing was a precondition to the novel
as we know it. Without that, we would have fictional prose narratives of some
length, but we probably wouldn't have them alluding to one another, we
wouldn't have large portions of the population reading them, and we wouldn't
have (relatively) large portions of the population with enough disposable
income to avoid them. If you look at surviving works prior to ~1600, almost
all of them are religious in nature because only the church had the resources
to fund writing, maintain large collections of writing, and bother writing
anything down.

After ~1600 (or ~1500, if you prefer, but that's about it), you have a lot of
things written that would previously not have been considered "worth" writing
down because writing and copying manuscripts was so expensive and time
consuming. Technology did change what was said. How something was said changed
what was said. Technology is doing the same thing now.

Gladwell is right in one sense: the media is probably overstating the
importance of Twitter and SMS. But both of those still play an important role
in what's going on. Somehow, people with grievances against monarchs and
dictators weren't all that successful on average in the years prior to ~1600.
After that, they got more and more successful, to the point where a fair bit
of world's population now lives without dictators. Part of the reason is
because ideas about freedom and good governance could be disseminated cheaply,
where before they couldn't, and everyone spent most waking hours covered in
shit, farming, and hoping they're not going to starve to death in late winter
/ early spring.

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InclinedPlane
I think Gladwell might be making a classic error in understanding twitter and
communication in general. Most communication is noise, or at least redundant.
Whether it's twitter or literature or conversation people do not generally
reserve communication for just those things which are important or profound. A
lot of communication, of all sorts, is a sea of triviality. People look to
twitter and they see this and then they write it off as itself trivial,
unknowing that they are judging twitter on different standards because it is
unfamiliar and novel. Even literature is predominantly trivial, but it is not
of itself entirely trivial.

Within the sea of triviality and banality there are nuggets of profundity.
More than that there is meta-contextual information that can be important and
profound as well, leading to the formation of a zeitgeist, which can solidify
further into outright culture.

So yes, twitter, on average, is not terribly interesting or profound. No more
so than an average telephone conversation or even the average news paper
article or book. But as a whole it is no less profound than literature or the
press.

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trustfundbaby
Its amazing to see how far Malcolm has backed himself into a corner by
initially pooh-poohing the impact of twitter on social activism.

Yes, revolutions will come and go with or without twitter, but to ignore the
massive multiplier effect that viral social media has in situations such as
this is ludicrous ... the fact that this is coming from the man who wrote 'The
Tipping Point' is _especially_ ironic.

~~~
svlla
you know that egypt has had the internet cut off for some time until recently
right? twitter simply does not matter here. not one iota.

~~~
ianhawes
I think most people outside of Egypt (and especially in the tech scene) THINK
that Twitter is whats fueling the protests, when in reality it is the mistakes
of the current regime. While I'm sure social media does have _some_ impact, I
doubt its anywhere near what western media is playing it out to be.

~~~
zaidf
Well, let's humor this idea and goto the other extreme: that Twitter etc. had
_very little_ impact.

Now, let's remove Twitter and the media _completely_.

What do we get? So we had a revolution in Tunisia that was very well televised
and communicated.

Remove the modern means of communication and media and Egyptians would have
_no where_ as much of an idea or source of inspiration, certainly not within
_days_ of the Tunisian revolution.

You can always retort that without mediums such as twitter news would still
spread even if at a slower pace. And similarly, a revolution would also occur
even if at a slower pace.

Then the _pace_ at which a revolution is occurring becomes a major point of
contention in this debate. I'd argue that twitter, cell phones etc. have
_significantly_ increased pace of communication and thus the time to
revolution. To, then, belittle them is like saying _who needs cars when we
could still WALK 5 miles; it'd just take longer_. A lot longer.

~~~
svlla
that's not an argument about twitter, that's more about the internet and
global communication. it would be different without the internet. it would not
be different without twitter. even so, the internet only played one piece --
communicating what happened in Tunisia. there were so many other factors in
place in Egypt that has brought it to where it is now that have nothing to do
with technology, despite how much you seem to fetishize it.

------
benkant
I just finished The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov which is a similarly
sobering take on the effects of social media and technology in general on
authoritarian governments.

I can't summarise it anywhere as well as this link can:

[http://www.amazon.com/Net-Delusion-Dark-Internet-
Freedom/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Net-Delusion-Dark-Internet-
Freedom/dp/1586488740)

If you believe that technology is inherently ethically neutral or that the use
of social networks will necessarily produce a net-increase in democracy or
freedom, perhaps it's worth reading for some balance.

Don't read everything you believe.

I had to unfollow a bunch of people on Twitter because they kept posting
articles and blogs about how technology was being used to "help the plight of
the Egyptians". You know, rather than articles about the plight itself.

~~~
tremendo
Just last week Cory Doctorow did (I believe) a really good analysis of
Morozov's Net Delusion: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/25/net-
activis...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/25/net-activism-
delusion)

As for Gladwell, I believe it's just too easy to take shots at "Social Media"
in general when clearly nothing can be proven. To me the mere fact that actual
people believe in it and feel helped and moved by it, constitutes enough
evidence of real value. Whether it makes a measurable difference in the
outcome of the Egyptian crisis is something that cannot really be proved one
way or the other and to me it almost feels like Gladwell wants to somehow draw
attention by arguing the point, which he already had taken on in a back-and-
forth argument with Clay Shirky some months ago.

Edited to add: That Egypt's government felt compelled to censor the Internet
and the use of SMS messaging is also powerful evidence of the value of these
ways of communication.

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jsomers
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.

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michaelty
No. They were able to put 1 million people into the streets with the internet
cut off.

But it does help.

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daleharvey
The medium isnt important as the message, the medium can help promote and
spread that message, Gladwell seems to really want to take what everyone else
knows as common sense and turning it into some "Twitter Sucks" agenda.

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p90x
The media likes to talk about twitter and facebook because it is profitable.
Social media stories have good margins, and wide market appeal.

Getting source material for a story is very easy and very cheap, this
increases their margins as opposed to paying a correspondent and crew which is
very expensive.

Also, talking about social media allows an uninformed and uninterested western
audience to relate to the events in a far away place. This increases the
potential market of the story.

News is a business, stories are their product.

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Uchikoma
Does the world need Malcom Gladwell?

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beoba
answer: nope

