Originally this was just going to be a link, but I had a few quick thoughts I figured I may as well share.
After hearing high school debaters talk about whether or not economic sanctions ought to be used to achieve foreign policy objects for five months, I can honestly say thank god for Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker this month. Not because I endorse the entirety of what he argues, but because I can finally get high school debaters to understand that their argument that uses Twitter in Iran as proof that technology solves for tyrannical control is absolutely absurd.
Even so, I have a real love/hate relationship with the article. He gets so much right, but at the same time, he gets so much wrong. The points about twitter and social media really are astute and critical observations that expose the techno-utopian desires for exactly what they are. Twitter doesn’t support Farsi – so why would it be a huge site for organizing? A quote that Gladwell picked out from Golnaz Esfandiari I think situates the discourse really effectively: “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection.”
But at the same time, I really dislike how he sets up traditional and online activism as two different poles, or as in opposition to each other. Perhaps there is reason to think that offline activism is being supplanted, but I don't see that sort of analysis in the article and I think that, ultimately, Gladwell's argumentation really breaks down once he starts discussing activism and different sorts of ties because it was treated more as a vehicle for the major point he was making, rather than a fully fleshed out analysis of activism in the digital age.
Maybe I’ll write about this in more detail later, but since I was just reading the article again I thought I’d post something quickly about it.
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