Blog Post Week 2

The past couple weeks in twitter history has demonstrated the argument presented in Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be tweeted,” and Mirani’s “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell, the revolution may well be tweeted. Gladwell claims the weak-ties twitter creates are not sufficient enough to facilitate a revolution. Mirani counteracts by claiming the activism that occurs on twitter is simply a redefinition of what activism can be. We saw twitter users making real change after Pepsi released an ad displaying Kendall Jenner giving a cop a can of Pepsi and everyone magically stopped protesting and started partying. Twitter collectively responded with outrage, satire, and general embarrassment that this ad would ever be released. It took less than a day for Pepsi to take down the ad and issue a formal apology. Twitter enacted real change and brought a billion dollar company to its knees. Another important note in twitter activism was brought up in Doctorow’s “We need a serious critique of net activism.” Critics of net activism claim that groups lack direction with many centripetal forces pulling activism efforts in many directions. Doctorow, however, says even in a normal revolution of sorts everyone will not be in concord about the direction of the group as a whole. This can be seen from the Anonymous group or the Nation of Islam during Malcolm X’s life. Both groups were divided but one was part of regular activism and the other was involved with normal activism. Both of these arguments revolving around net activism demonstrate how we must redefine our definition of activism to include this new powerful means of activism.