Tweets from Birmingham jail

Abstract

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article ‘Small Change’1 has set the blogosphere buzzing with its strongly stated argument that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter will not usher in a new age of social activism, as some digital evangelists have proposed, but that they and the relationships they foster are actually detrimental to real social change. As Gladwell puts it, ‘The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.’