Interesting insights from Malcolm Gladwell on social media!
Celebrated writer Malcolm Gladwell seems to have penned the script for the first part of the 21st century, with his provocative bestsellers on ideas such as contagion (The Tipping Point), the power of instant conclusions (Blink) and the genesis of genius (Outliers). But Mr. Gladwell, who returns home to Canada briefly this week, is conspicuously and deliberately absent from a central part of modern life: social media. His blog posts are biannual, his Facebook page is a placeholder and he has never ventured on to Twitter . On Wednesday in Vancouver, he speaks to the F5 Expo, an executive conference on changing online technologies. But first he spoke to The Globe and Mail on the social media – and why he’s cut himself off from much of that world.
On balance, are the social media a positive or negative thing?
I’d like to think that on balance any innovation, at the end of the day, is usually a net good. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant and sometimes adverse consequences that we need to find another way to deal with. While we’re in the midst of the revolution, we need to stop and talk about its broader consequences.
Can you give me an example?
The ease with which you can organize people means you no longer have to go to the trouble of things like building strong grassroots organizations, developing a coherent message, forming strong and lasting ties with individuals. That’s one consequence. The reason that people did that in the past is that it was really hard, that you had to that to build a broader organization. Now, you can do the broad part so easily, you don’t have to do your homework first.
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