Comments on: Memo to Malcolm Gladwell: Nice Hair, But You Are Wrong

By: Denim

Denim — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 21:09:11 +0000

I know I am late to this dance, however I am shocked that the obvious reference to “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” — a poem and song by Gil Scott-Heron from 1971, is missing from all these conversations.
———-
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

By: Laurel L. Russwurm

Laurel L. Russwurm — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:01:27 +0000

@Rick he wasn't even born when the incident he begins the "Small Change" article with happened. So of course he learned about it from traditional media... books, movies etc. How do you "rate" types of activism? If it's by success, fifty years later there is still a need of civil rights activism in the United States. Laws have changed in the United States but attitudes haven't. Racism is very much alive and well. In some ways the need for civil right is much stronger, as free speech is in more danger than ever. I found Gladwell's lack of research disturbing as he seems to blame the Twitter for not making "the revolution". Social Media tools are tools, as I explained in my blog back in September: Oh! Canada: Tie Theory article. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell might also note that there is lots of online social media activism going on back home in Canada. Oh! Canada: Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble… G8/G20 Byron Sonne was an online anti-G20 activist, whose online tweets brought him to the attention of Canadian security forces. Today he is Canada's very own political prisoner, and sits in jail, twice denied bail. #FreeByron

By: Gideon Rosenblatt

Gideon Rosenblatt — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:18:36 +0000

I wonder if Gladwell had any idea what kind of storm he was going to create with his piece, but I, for one, am very thankful. Why? Because this question of how online activism effects real social change is long overdue.

I’ve just left a job, where I spent the last ten years working on how to make various technologies like Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. work for social change.

My conclusion:

We need better bridges between the weak ties of the Internet and the strong ties connected with face-to-face relationships. It’s time to start looking concretely at how we better connect these important kinds of relationships – the strategies, the technologies and the organizational processes.

More here: http://www.alchemyofchange.net/bridging-weak-and-strong-ties/

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:06:49 +0000

It was meant to be funny — and was a reference to the tweet that Twitter founder Biz Stone posted about his essay, as I mentioned in the post.

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 04:15:01 +0000

Spot on what? Self-aggrandizing deconstruction?

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 04:10:00 +0000

That dude was like 5 years old during the Civil Rights movement…how would he know what real activism is?

By: Stephen Malagodi

Stephen Malagodi — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:52:27 +0000

Any kid of social movement is the result of enormous pressure, built up over time. The open actions that are witnessed as activism, protest or full-scale revolution are merely the final expression, or release of that pressure. Very much in the same way as familiar natural phenomenon, like water pressure, air pressure, voltage, etc.
While Twitter and other social media can facilitate coordination of that expression, it cannot either be used to create it or, in my opinion, sustain it.
They are communications tools. That’s what the word ‘medium’ in this case means. It’s the simple difference between talking [chatting] about something and the costly business of doing something.

By: Andres Barreto

Andres Barreto — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:04:45 +0000

Gladwell’s argument was made with a series of apples-to-oranges comparison and cherry picking.

I agree that alone they are not worth much, but when you put together these tools with offline action, it results in more empowerment for social movements, and they no longer need central organization nor high costs to get started.

Thanks for the synthesis of arguments, puts everything in perspective.

PS: Colombians had a march agains the illegal armed forces of the country, not agains the nation’s government armed forces. It’s an easy detail to overlook, but I feel it’s important enough to be corrected. (I’m Colombian)

By: Vicki

Vicki — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 22:33:52 +0000

`All this, Gladwell says, “happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.”’

True.
So?
Those means of communicating did not exist.
We cannot know (and should not postulate) what would have happened if they _had existed_.

The Greensboro sit-in also happened without velcro, cell phones, Diet Coke, cable television, Post-it notes, the Ethernet, Valium, non-dairy creamer, or audio casettes.

So what?

Books, newspapers, and the written word in other forms, make a difference in people’s lives today. But you can go back 1000 years and claim that “something” happened without benefit of the written word.

Whatever the invention (the “tool”), you can go back to a time before it existed and show that people still did “something”. This makes for a loud argument with much heat that is interesting to many people… but it’s a meaningless argument nonetheless.

By: Justin Cambria

Justin Cambria — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:05:55 +0000

I agree with Mick in that bandwagon-y slagging of Gladwell because you may like Twitter and he said it is somewhat overblown is unproductive, but think Mathhew, Biz, Anil, and others have legitimate gripes with his story. I noted that Gladwell’s overall point is probably right, that these tools UNTO THEMSELVES are unlikely to directly spark anything as dramatic as the Woolworth’s sit ins. I think he drastically underestimates their existing and potential power to catalyze those kinds of events. I pointed out that he oversimplified their role in Iran and Moldova to beef up his point.

And let’s remember, this stuff is in its infancy. I’m not sure it’s the right time to dismiss them as unpowerful in social change.

Here’s my post: http://www.pullnotpush.com/Pull-Marketing/bid/43794/Malcolm-Gladwell-The-Revolution-Will-Not-Be-Tweeted