QCQ for _(name the reading) Gladwell’s “Small Change”
Quotation (with page number or paragraph number or timestamp if video/audio)
“These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade – and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.”
Comment (250-500 words)
As someone who stays very very up to date with online protests, causes, and awareness, reading this article opened my eyes to an interesting perspective that I haven’t considered before. Since I have grown up in such a digital age, I forgot that some of the most powerful movements have been orchestrated without any help from the internet or any form of social media. The one that the article had mentioned at the beginning of the article had gathered thousands of people all across the South to one cause in a short amount of time for a time with limited high-speed communication.
What I must add; however, is that social media has allowed for such a quick method of spreading the word, that many important causes have been organized, involving much more people and in a much shorter amount of time. A couple of examples include the Black Lives Matter Movement that hit its all-time spike in awareness in June of 2020 and Greta Thunberg’s Strike for Climate movement which has been consistently fighting for climate action since August of 2018. Both of these causes were spread widely on social media, recruiting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
Now, I want to address two sides of the argument that social media may not be as effective as spreading change as older methods of communication. There are cons for both and pros for both. I would like to highlight one of the cons social media (as a method of spreading awareness and igniting causes) has that is a slight setback. Social media makes it so quick and simple to start a cause and spread the word, but since the internet is flooded with things such as this, people get easily overwhelmed and mostly choose to ignore. I once talked with a friend and asked her why she doesn’t stay up to date on current protests and sorts and she said it was because it was too much to keep up with. Depending on the person absorbing all of the information, I would agree with this. For some, it is emotionally too much to deal with and for others, it is too time-consuming to be up to date with everything that happens in the world. Not that I am saying we need to know every little thing that is going on, I just mean that it can be too much simply because it is so crowded with information.
Question
Which do you think is the better option? Plain and simple word of mouth (and news) or social media? Why?
