peterfeld:

rickwebb:

peterfeld:

rickwebb:

I must have missed Mubarek shutting down Soros, FSM and that lamplight kicking cow along with his shutting down of THE INTERNET. 

Or maybe he was shutting the internet down because he was afraid of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I suppose that’s conceivable. Silly EVERYONE for thinking it was because of Twitter and Facebook that he was afraid of. 

Well it’s certainly intensely puzzling how 2 million people were able to mass yesterday without benefit of Twitter or Facebook or working cell phones.

Gladwell did not claim that the internet wasn’t essential to a revolution. And no, the internet is not essential to a revolution. He was claiming that the internet aspects of the revolt were  ”the least interesting thing.” He claimed it wasn’t newsworthy at all. If Mubarek banned Gucci or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it would be newsworthy. Twitter and Facebook are newsworthy if for no other reason than Mubarek made them so in his actions. 

OK, Gladwell goes too far. I don’t mean to sign on to everything he said last summer, either. (And “how interesting” someone finds the social media angle isn’t all that interesting in itself.) I do agree with his point — and this is why I stay on it — that people with grievances can mobilize with or without these tools. And I think the U.S. media are so intent on this angle simply because it’s a knee-jerk news hook for them, or because they identify with (and want to flatter) the social media community, and end up imposing a false narrative on what happened.

michelledean recommends some pieces that are better and deeper than Gladwell on the topic of social media and popular uprisings like Egypt:

Try this person.  Or this one.  Or this one.  All of them are working off of facts and real research, not whimsical attempts at contrarianism.

I agree with much of what Gladwell’s original piece argued, but he got this one rather wrong. While the democratic uprising in Egypt has obviously continued and grown without internet access, January 25th began as a Facebook event that over 60,000 RSVPed to. That’s a “weak commitment” that bolstered everyone’s willingness to go out there that day. And if Mubarak hadn’t shut off the internet, we’d now be absorbing a fire hose of citizen coverage every single piece of brutality, every bit of heroism that has occurred in the last week.