The Perils of Punditry

Poor Malcolm Gladwell. After writing a stinging indictment of the ineffectuality of the internet in activism – "Social media can’t provide what social change has always required" – he got a lot of pushback from those who felt his take was a bit grumpy and lacking in nuance.Clay Shirkey, another thinker on the impacts of new communications tools on society, wrote up his much more optimistic vision in Foreign Affairs. (Sorry, paywall.) In the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2011), Gladwell and Clay Shirkey argued in a brief response to Shirkey's piece. They must be archrivals on the basis of coiffure alone. Gladwell demands Shirkey demonstrate his case by proving a counterfactual: "for his argument to be anything close to persuasive, he has to convince readers that in the absence of social media, those uprisings would not have been possible." Shirkey replies with a series of examples where the ability to mobilize quickly using messaging networks was critical, but has to rely on past events using SMS.

It would be impossible to tell the story of Philippine President Joseph Estrada's 2000 downfall without talking about how texting allowed Filipinos to coordinate at a speed and on a scale not available with other media. Similarly, the supporters of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero used text messaging to coordinate the 2004 ouster of the People's Party in four days.

I bet he has some better examples now. We at NDItech have the advantage of being implementors: we don't have to push a controversial thesis to get articles published, and we're forced to see both sides of issues on the ground. It can make us a bit mushy, I suppose, in our thinking – "Everyone's right!" – but we definitely agree with Shirkey on this one: social media is a powerful tool that facilitates organization and communication among disparate groups of activists, which is at the heart of political change. After all, if the internet is so useless, why do the autocrats keep trying to turn it off?