Gladwell v Shirky?

The lesson here is that just because innovations in communications technology happen does not mean that they matter; or, to put it another way, in order for an innovation to make a real difference, it has to solve a problem that was actually a problem in the first place. This is the question that I kept wondering about throughout Shirky's essay-and that had motivated my New Yorker article on social media, to which Shirky refers: What evidence is there that social revolutions in the pre-Internet era suffered from a lack of cutting-edge communications and organizational tools? In other words, did social media solve a problem that actually needed solving? Shirky does a good job of showing how some recent protests have used the tools of social media. But for his [Shirky's] argument to be anything close to persuasive, he has to convince readers that in the absence of social media, those uprisings would not have been possible.

The competitive landscape gets altered because the Internet allows insurgents to play by different rules than incumbents. (Curiously, the importance of this difference is best explained by Gladwell himself, in his 2009 New Yorker essay "How David Beats Goliath.") So I would break Gladwell's question of whether social media solved a problem that actually needed solving into two parts: Do social media allow insurgents to adopt new strategies? And have those strategies ever been crucial? Here, the historical record of the last decade is unambiguous: yes, and yes.

Digital networks have acted as a massive positive supply shock to the cost and spread of information, to the ease and range of public speech by citizens, and to the speed and scale of group coordination. As Gladwell has noted elsewhere, these changes do not allow otherwise uncommitted groups to take effective political action. They do, however, allow committed groups to play by new rules.

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Even the increased sophistication and force of state reaction, however, underline the basic point: these tools alter the dynamics of the public sphere. Where the state prevails, it is only by reacting to citizens' ability to be more publicly vocal and to coordinate more rapidly and on a larger scale than before these tools existed.

He notes that the technology's primacy is measured in longer time scales. Its importance lies in lowering the cost of communication and coordination. The argument goes like this: enabling people to communicate among themselves strengthens civil society. This in turn exposes the contradictions between what the authorities say and what truly exists—creating what Mr Shirky calls a "conservative dilemma" (employing a term from media studies). Thus the groundwork is set for reform. The technology simply helped it happen.

It isn't binary. There is a third case; advances we would not ever give up or reverse are not always pressaged by a clear identified problem to be solved. It may seem like a mundane example, but I still remember clearly how years ago, when the company I worked for were considering implementing email, as difficult to understand as it might sound today, no business case could be made. The IT manager responsible didn't know what to put on the form under the section "Business Case" for justifying the purchase. But that didn't mean everyone, execs included didn't just know it would make anything other than a huge difference to the business. Some improvements are huge, profound, even sometimes critical for, practically speaking, X, Y, or Z are to occur but may be difficult to measure nevertheless. A profound / big impact advance doesn't have to have a big problem To solve before it can rank as such. This kind of advance is much more rare, but not unprecedented and usually seems to involve enhanced communication.

The social psychology by which e.g. Hitler came to power has been much studied and is still not fully understood. To think the volume of communications and comparative instantaneity of social networking might not have a substantial and profound effect on an area involving mass social psychololgy, for me, shows a distinct lack of vision. On the other hand to make unfounded statements lacks academic rigour, so it's clear this will be a thesis rich topic, I'm not sure it is one that will result in a provable, verifiable conclusion. The debate is surely set to continue for some time yet.