Rather than arguing about what social media can’t do, focus on what it can, urges Aaron Bady writing for MIT’s Technology Review this week. He looks at the role of tools like Twitter and Facebook in the Egyptian revolution, and without giving credit to them for “starting” the revolution, or even “causing” the revolution, he makes a thoughtful, reasoned argument for appreciating what they can do. He counters arguments from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, that social media organising revolves around ‘weak ties,’ by suggesting that sometimes weak ties are exactly what you need to keep people working together – and not getting bogged down in disagreements over the detail.

Read more here – It’s worth it.

This entry was posted on August 30th, 2011 at 9:39 am by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Activism, Governance, Media, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.