Last week I saw quite a few tweets flying around that I found unsettling. They were in response to Malcolm Gladwell’s comments on the Egypt Protest in his article in The New Yorker “Does Egypt Need Twitter?”

For example here is a tweet I saw from marketing blogger @JeffJarvis: .

And this is my response.

Social media is an important new channel, but people have been staging coups for centuries.

The medium has changed, but the message has not. Let’s not forget the important issue here–the actual people and social turmoil. That’s the story.

Not the importance of social media. And let’s not beat up journalists who are not afraid to bring us back down to earth. We are very disconnected from the reality of a situation on the ground like what’s happening in Egypt, so it’s easy to get lost in the headlines. The story is the poverty rate in Egypt is 40%. That’s really high. And I feel compassion for these people.

I’m not saying freedom to use the internet is not important–it is.

But I am saying the media focuses on the headlines that
will draw audiences, and pay advertisers. Let’s not believe everything that we read without being critical thinkers…
including headlines about Twitter and Facebook.