Last weekend, dozens of Cornellians and Ithaca College students joined 10,000 other young Americans in D.C. for Power Shift 2011 — a conference geared towards environmental activism. Forty-one years after the first Earth Day, the conference’s turnout and growing youth support for the environmental movement helped restore some faith in our generation’s ability to care about more than our Facebook news feeds. 

Carolyn Witte '12 critiques last week's Malcolm Gladwell essay on activism in the 21st century.

Jon Weinberg '13 makes the decision to unplug himself from Facebook for a week.

It’s kind of a no-shit-Sherlock that I’m one hell of a chatty Cathy. I talk fast, I talk a lot; and if you were to ask my brother, he’d tell you that I dispense with more words in a week than most do in a year. That said, any therapist would probably tell you that I am really good at talking a lot without saying anything at all.

If the revolution will not be televised, it will probably stream on YouTube.

During his first official visit to China, President Barack Obama told an audience of students in Shanghai that he is a “strong supporter” of social media websites like Twitter.

“The more freely information flows,” the President explained, “the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable.”

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question. As a stickler for the written word and old fashioned journalism, I’ve been extremely hesitant to create a Twitter account, feeling that if I do, I’m giving into the enemy: social media. For traditional newshounds like myself, social media is the archenemy of journalism. It threatens the integrity of our work and our authority to report the news with legitimacy. Yet in light of Iran’s Twitter Revolution and the explosion of new users around the world, I figured Twitter deserved a thorough analysis before I dismissed it for good. Maybe this will help you decide if your Blackberry could use another application — Twitterberry — or if your e-mail inbox can afford yet another means of congestion.

Some issues to think about: