Wednesday, April 22, 2015

"Small Change"

As I was reading, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” I was a bit confused on to what exactly it was talking about so I am going to write what I think it was trying to say. What I picked up from the reading was that technology and social media is pretty much taking over the world, at least in some places. Such as Twitter, Facebook etc. it is more common to see world wide problems on there and are more talked about on there. Back in the day, it was more difficult to spread news to another friend from another state because you didn’t have the social media we have now. And because of this, society is coming together even more and we as a society are helping each other even more. As Gladwell talked more about these social medias, he uses logos because he trying to tell us that with social media like Facebook, Twitter are making activism more effective. It is also helping them express themselves just but posting a tweet or a picture. But there is also a negative when it comes to social media according to Gladwell, he mentions, “ Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals.” We see these networks as something we can find “friends” even know we do not know how they even look like in person or if they really are a real person. Because of all of these networks we are lacking the ability to actually go out into the real world and actually help others out. Instead people are sitting on the couch on their laptop, on twitter, twitting “Oh ya I support these dude all the way.” When they should actually be by the guys side. 

3 comments:

  1. I can help you with the difficulty understanding what Gladwell is writing about. Gladwell is a renowned writer in the field of revolution analysis. "Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" is Gladwell's comparison of revolutions with and without social media. Gladwell flips between two events. The civil rights movement and the Iranian revolution. Gladwell cites that the members of the civil rights movement were people who had deep personal ties to the revolution that made them activists who went out of their way to make to movement prosper. Compare that to the Iranian revolution, where millions of people shared the hashtag "iranelection" the problem with Iran's revolution was that these millions of Twitter followers were just that, followers. Gladwell even continues to note that many of the tweets about the Iranian election were in English and were tweeted by passive viewing Americans. This is the main reason that Gladwell writes that social media is not an effective tool for a revolution because it lacks any form of leading hierarchy and insights motivation but no action for a revolution, as opposed to opposed to movements from the past that were extremely successful because of the members active participation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" written by author Malcolm Gladwell focuses on a logos approach. Logos, meaning an analytical appeal to it's readers, was used in this reading in numerous places. Gladwell uses many examples and readers can really tell that the author is well educated about everything that he is writing about. Which was the Civil Rights Movement, social media, the Iranian revolution, networking and more. The reason I feel like this short read was focused on a logos approach is because of the endless references the author uses and how well they tied in together to prove points throughout his work. He also knew many details about each even he mentioned, especially with the Civil Rights Movement. He mentions many staggering facts in the beginning of his read which appealed to me and kept me reading the rest of the essay. I believe Gladwell really took advantage of logos in his reading opposed to Ethos and Pathos.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted." was a very logos based reading. I was confused for most of it but I felt there was a lot of thought and logic put behind it. I think he was trying to compare things to one another like the revolutions and talk about how effective each one was. The civil rights that he talked about were interesting to read and I got the sense he was very motivated when writing about this piece. I feel there was Ethos in that area because of the passion I sensed. However I couldn't find any good examples of Pathos and wonder if that impacted the other sections poorly.

    ReplyDelete