The Global Post has an interesting piece on Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of "The Tipping Point," "Blink," and "Outliers." Gladwell insists social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have not played a central role in the revolutions changing the landscape of the Middle East. In a Feb. 2 post in The New Yorker, Gladwell argued the "how" of a communcative act is not as important as the "why." High-risk social activism requires deep roots and strong ties, he argues - not exactly a characteristic of social meda. Revolutions have happened throughout history without Twitter.
But The Global Post argues that while Gladwell "deserves credit for reality-checking the hyperbole over the democratizing magic of social media," he doesn't address the question of why dictators (and regimes) find mass media so threatening. If a tree falls down in the middle of a forest and no one hears it, did it fall down?
Take the example of Indonesia in 1975, The Global Post explains. Entire villages in East Timor were getting slaughtered. Hoping for outside help, rebels put their faith in a precious piece of digital technology.
"Rebel leader Xanana Gusmao was desperate to alert the outside world to these crimes. But how? Surrounded by ocean and enemy territory, in the darkest years of the struggle, they relied on a Wagner 50-watt single sideband transceiver, which they hauled to mountain tops to transmit a staticky signal in hopes that supporters in Australia would be listening. The rebels rushed their broadcasts so that the enemy couldn’t track the signal and kill them. Complicating matters, only one man among them — “his nom de guerre was Hadomi,” Xanana told me — was strong enough to carry the massive transceiver battery. Eventually the Indonesians killed Hadomi, and the rebels were silenced."
Would more people in East Timor have survived if they managed to transmit a bit longer? Would Australians have rushed to help if only the rebels had posted photos on Facebook? History doesn't allow reruns, at least at this point.
But the story points to the complexity of unraveling social media's role. Gladwell, a sociologist, tends toward deterministic (inevitable) theories. "How" is put in its box as neatly as "why," without considering the morphings that perhaps do not repeat history and cannot be easily explained. Has the force of everyday oppression and the glimmers of escape through social media played out in the past? Is there something fundamentally new about humans and the digital environment, or does social media just represent a faster or different way to communicate, as Gladwell argues. What do you think?
As a reader of most of Galdwell's books, I would like to agree with him on this issue as well. Communication has always been mandatory for humans and the digital options are merely new channels. Unfortunately, the technology has not render higher levels of intelligence.
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