devices cannot replace social movements. As an example of a spontaneous and organic social movement, he cites the lunch counter protests against segregation begun by a handful of black college students at a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s in 1960. This brave act of civil disobedience by just a few people quickly grew in size, and similar protests soon spread across the South and became a major part of the Civil Rights movement.
Gladwell raises some very interesting issues that are worthy of consideration. But with his assertion that new forms of online communication and social media cannot replace social movements, and at best only 
facilitate them, Gladwell might be splitting hairs. Of course the protesters at Greensboro did not have computers or cell phones to help generate national interest. But their efforts certainly benefited from coverage in newspapers, radio, television, and of course word of mouth from good `ole rotary telephones. People may not have been able to tweet, but they could certainly pick up the phone and dial, as annoyingly laborious as that might seem to people today. In other words, social movements and communications technology are not the same thing, and though they might overlap and at times serve each other’s purpose, it’s important not to confuse them.
At the end of the day Facebook, Twitter, blogs both micro and macro, IM’s and text 
messages are all forms of communication, not community. No matter how sophisticated, important, helpful, or even revolutionary it is, a system of communication is not the same thing as a complex social institution, whether the kinds of social movements Gladwell considers in the New Yorker piece or the bygone American communities I discuss in Disintegration.