I am very familiar with two of your books, having read them personally, and I have a passing familiarity with several of the others, as my boyfriend is a fan of yours. You actually signed a copy of "The Tipping Point" that I stole from him and mailed to your assistant in New York City, then gave him as a gag Christmas gift. That was very kind of you and I deeply appreciate the gesture.
However - and this is a big however - I think you're kind of lame. There's a lot of interesting stuff in your books, but there is also a lot of not-so-interesting, not-so-helpful stuff that you try to pass off as massively brilliant and deeply perceptive. You look like a cross between Martin Short and Michael Jackson. I don't like it, not one little bit.
Plus an afro, I guess.
You make the observation in your New Yorker essay, "The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted," that the civil rights demonstrations of the 60s were founded on a network of close personal ties and not, for instance, distant acquaintances on Facebook. And you do have a point there. The courage of those activists in facing the dogs and fire hoses shouldn't be compared to a stray tweet about starving children in a third world nation, no matter how many times it might be retweeted by like-minded users.
But then again, we live in a country where we are generally allowed to voice our dissent, and the savage beatings of our citizens that occur on our soil (hopefully fewer and further between than other nations) are not taken lying down. We have a Bill of Rights, we have a Constitution. We feel entitled by birth to our freedoms, and if some of us are allowed to take advantage of them while others are not, it becomes a matter of broader national interest by nature of our laws and our sense of fairness.
Other countries aren't like us. Other countries have severely limited access to the kinds of public news organizations that we take for granted here. In one of his talks, Clay Shirky pointed out that a massive earthquake in China was shared with the world almost instantly due to our new communication technologies. Contrast with the last major earthquake they experienced: "It took the Chinese government 3 months to admit it had even happened." At some point, close personal ties drop off due to geographic impossibilities, and that's when social media becomes invaluable. The aforementioned distant acquaintances on Facebook can keep each other in the know. Someone who didn't know to donate money can now do so, if they are moved enough. And the voiceless, living under the information suppression imposed by their governments, are given a voice.
In your different ways, I think you and Shirky are both right. Those whom you describe as "social media evangelists" may be overestimating the impact that people who barely know each other and live thousands of miles apart may have on one another. It's true that it takes far more courage to face the brutality of your government-sponsored oppressors in the name of your cause than it does to tweet a picture of said brutality. But let's not look at things in terms of either/or. The two phenomena can and must work together to publicize injustices and make this world safer and more just. However portentous Clay Shirky may seem to you, he is right in his claim that social networking is changing the speed at which and the manner in which we share information. And information facilitates activism, for you can only correct an injustice if you've learned of it in the first place.
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