Gladwell, Malcolm. (2010). Twitter,
Facebook, and Social activism. The
New Yorker Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Malcolm Gladwell's (2010) article "Twitter, Facebook, and Social activism" in The New Yorker uses the active voice to begin the article. Gladwell provides a past event that has happened and uses that situation to allow the reader to image what kind of event happened and what could it be related to in our present day society. He then signals the reader that there will be a change in time in his writing by connecting the event to today's media through the phrase, "The events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war ... and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter" (Gladwell, 2010). He uses this line as his argument for his article in which he later backs up using quotes from historians, facts, statistics and as well as asking readers questions to get them to think about how it would relate back to what they have previously just read. He also shows the cause and effect writing method to show how one event in the past lead to a civil-war and how that can be related to today and how activist groups connect with one another using social media (Gladwell, 2010).
After providing his opening example and thesis, he continues to jump back to his example several times within his article; however, he changes his active voice to a passive voice and combines little details from the past together into paragraphs while leaving major points in their own separate paragraph. By combining little details together, it allows the reader to image that they are possibly viewing the events from afar. This helps to transition into contrasting the different between social media and the connections that are created and how there are still benefits within "weak links" (Gladwell, 2010). While he writes about the benefits of social media, he also provides the downside of it as well. By doing so the paper then is not bias thoughts one side instead it provides both points of view on the topic (Gladwell, 2010).
He ends off his article with a question but provides an answer as well as using a foreign phrase "Viva la revoluciรณn" which can be translated in "Long live the revolution!" This is an interesting way to end off the article since it reminds the reader that he Gladwell was writing about social media and revolution that come out from it (Gladwell, 2010).
Sources: Malcolm Gladwell. (2010). Twitter, Facebook,
and Social activism. The New Yorker Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
