Summary Of Small Change By Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, a writer for the New Yorker and one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2005, makes a bold claim in his essay entitled Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. The essay responds to the increasing importance of social media in society by focusing on the relationship between social media and activism. Which leads us to Gladwell’s claim about how social media couldn’t bring about activism due to the weak personal connection/weak-ties it provides. He conveys this through the use of anecdotes such as the Greensboro sit-in, a phone theft, and The Twitter Revolution. Although Gladwell uses these to make an excellent point in his claim about how personal connection plays a key role in activism, his claim

This was a prime case of immense activism without the benefits technology and social media provides us today. Gladwell uses this to go into his claim of how the personal connection of people in the matter was undoubtedly the reason for this to be possible. However, while debating how amazing this was, he fails to imagine if given today’s technology the Greensboro sit-in people would have done several things differently. Social media would allow for the widespread of the sit-in to happen on a larger scale and earlier; they would also most likely feel more secure as a result of the help they could assemble in a short time through technology/social media. So, while Gladwell’s point was to show activism has happened before several times without social media and how, although it aids with activism, it doesn't actually achieve anything due to its inability to grant people to form a strong personal connection with the event taking place. While not completely disregarding the fact how social media can be a great tool for activism, he fails to consider the ability to be able to make good friends online, or rather a strong-tie/personal

While this shows how Gladwell doesn’t dismiss the idea of social media having an important impact on activism, the article goes on to give his opinion about how far that impact goes. In the anecdote about “Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution,” he ends with Golnaz Esfandiari’s claim on how there wasn’t a revolution at all and there was only people protesting online halfway across the globe not making a significant impact. He uses this claim to convey his own, that social media has made us “...forgotten what activism is”(Gladwell 404). Showing the true meaning behind Gladwell’s meaning of how social media has “reinvented” activism. So, according to Gladwell: while the social media has reinvented social activism to a form that doesn't necessarily have a meaningful impact on society, it does have the capability to fuel one. Yet, he goes on to dismiss this and appears like he, himself, is not certain of whether social media can