Blog Post #1:
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay for the New Yorker titled “Small Change” that was published back in October of 2010 – in short, he argued that social media will never be used to enact social change. The larger conversation revolved around digital life and social change; how social media doesn’t have the correct tools needed to enact changes the way the civil-rights movement and other movements of the sort did. Gladwell discussed the beginning of the civil-rights movement in the sixties, how just four black college students sat down at a lunch counter for “whites only” and the protest found itself with around 70,000 other students shortly after – Gladwell stated, “these events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the south for the rest of the decade – and it happened without email, texting, Facebook or Twitter” (192). Gladwell seems to use facts to back up his thoughts, there is no denying that the civil-rights movement did not use any of those platforms, but, that is just common sense. When discussing how Moldova did not use Twitter as a basis for a revolution, he used information acquired by “Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford” to conclude that “Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist” (193). It seems as if Gladwell uses facts to make conclusions about topics, making his statements indisputable. Gladwell also appears to use statements from other people to back up his argument. In discussing how social media couldn’t be used to enact social change because it is based on networks instead of hierarchies, he used a quote from an essay written by “international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones” that stated, “structural features typical of networks – the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms” (197). As well, Gladwell appears to address counterarguments directly; there is one specifically, at the end of his essay, where he discussed how social media was used to find a lost cellphone, but he quickly disputes this counterargument on the basis of how trivial it is by stating, “a networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teenage girls, Viva la revolución” (199). Gladwell appears to use ethos and logos to connect with the audience – he established credibility (ethos) by using facts and logic (logos) to back up his arguments. Lastly, Gladwell has definitely convinced me of his argument – he made his argument clear in the beginning and used a lot of evidence and facts to back up his claims. I was also especially convinced when he provided counterarguments to his claims, such as with the lost cell phone, and then directly refuted said counterarguments.
