Check out this blog post on GIGAOM, written in response to claims by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) that social media is irrelevant when it comes to “real activism”: Gladwell Still Missing the Point About Social Media and Activism. The comments in particular are very interesting.
For me, the key paragraph in the post is this:
But as sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argues in a blog post responding to Gladwell — and as we argued in a recent post here — the point is not that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook cause revolutions in any real sense. What they are very good at doing, however, is connecting people in very simple ways, and making those connections in a very fast and widely-distributed manner. This is the power of a networked society and of cheap, real-time communication networks.