Kidding.

While some like Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov belittle the hubris of crediting Facebook and Twitter for such a contribution, revolutionaries like Wael Ghonim and armchair commentators like the greater Twitter userbase love to gab about social media’s role in community organizing and couriering authentic messages to the world.

The companies behind these services also describe their roles differently. Facebook insists that it is not political while Twitter has explicitly declared the freedom to tweet is a human right.

In a post on his personal blog this week (complete with illustrative charts like the example above), Othman Laraki, Twitter director of search and geo, went so far as to propose a “revolutionary equation” that can be tipped by a critical mass of dissent.

Laraki contended that Twitter and Facebook reduce the cost of dissent and increase the cost of suppressing it. When a group of people thinks it is big enough to take on a government, it will do so, and this process can be facilitated by Facebook groups and pages and Twitter hashtags and followers.

So basically, Twitter and Facebook help revolutions get closer to a tipping point, to borrow a term from Gladwell.

The public nature of these sites can help get the word out to a larger audience (Laraki downplayed the chance that governments are also watching social media).

And social media can be amplified by traditional media. Laraki called the BBC News “a massive Twitter application that pressured governments to reduce the cost of dissent and further increased the expectation of mass for the revolutionaries.”

Oh dear, BoomTown is still jetlagged from my recent trip to China and now Microsoft Bing is offering up a head-requiring event later this morning in San Francisco to explore the future of search.

There better be donuts.

A lot and with sprinkles, since speakers include the lugubrious investor and hedge fund philosophizer Peter Thiel and skunk-at-a-Web-garden-party author Malcolm Gladwell.

Here’s Microsoft Bing exec Satya Nadella’s blog post on the event, as well as one pre-video of what to expect from the sessions.

In it, Gladwell, noting the richness in search has yet to cure cancer, has a good point, which should be interesting with the backdrop of the protests going on in Egypt and elsewhere.

As in: If governments can block search, does it really matter?

I will be posting if someone comes up with a good answer to that one.

Bing and Big Think present Farsight 2011: “Beyond the Search Box” Event and Webcast

In the past ten years, search has transformed the way we experience the web even as the web itself has changed. New user interfaces, mobile devices, and interactive services are evolving beyond text pages intertwining the ‘web’ into all aspects of our lives and thus we expect to be able to do more online with less friction. Along with the innovation has come an explosion of information and services that are compounding at an exponential rate. Trying to get things done on the web is becoming more complex and fragmented every day. In short, unlike many consumer products, the problems facing the search industry are getting harder–not easier.

In order for us to truly realize the science-fiction dream of so many of us kids, of that ubiquitous intelligent agent, we want to elevate the discussion in search beyond next quarter’s technology. To begin to do that Bing has teamed with Big Think to bring the best minds from inside and outside the industry together for a series of spirited conversations, panels, and demos examining the “Future of Search.”

The group we’ve assembled includes Hedge Fund Manager and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Recorded Future co-founder and CEO Chris Ahlberg, journalist entrepreneur Esther Dyson, contrarian journalist and “Tipping Point” author Malcolm Gladwell among others.

In addition, Farsight 2011 will include a search industry roundtable featuring Matt Cutts from Google, Rich Skrenta from Blekko and our very own Harry Shum from Bing. The panel and much of the day will be moderated by the entrepreneur and technologist, Vivek Wadhwa.

You are invited to take part in the discussion, by submitting your questions for the experts in advance at BigThink.com. Then return on February 1 to watch the conference streaming LIVE from 10:00am to 2:00pm PST on Big Think.com.

I encourage you to tune and be a part of the conversation to help all of us realize the potential that this most powerful technology can bring.

Satya Nadella–Senior Vice President, Online Services

“It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable. He pointed out that you don’t ever get much of anything done by just telling people you’re going to do it; you actually have to do it….Anyone who’s claiming that sending a tweet by itself is activism, that’s ludicrous–but no one’s claiming that, at least no one that’s credible.”

– Twitter co-founder Ev Williams shrugs off Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of the significance of Twitter and other social media in bringing about social change.

Malcolm Gladwell pees in the social media punch bowl today, with an essay designed to humiliate and/or enrage anyone who thinks that Twitter, Facebook et al can be used to do really significant things.

It’s a bit of a hammer to a fly, really. Because everyone knows, intuitively, that Twitter can’t overthrow governments and that Facebook can’t stop genocide.

But Gladwell spells it out for us, anyway:

The evangelists of social media…seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960…In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Gladwell doesn’t argue with the idea that Facebook and Twitter are good communication platforms, mind you. But he argues that communication alone doesn’t do anything–getting stuff done takes hard work, structure and person-to-person contact. And in the case of really big things, like the civil rights movement, it takes personal risk.

And social networks can make all of that stuff harder to achieve, he says:

It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Gladwell–or someone using his name and image–does have a Twitter account, by the way. He joined in December 2008, and now has 60,661 followers. He has used the service to send out a grand total of 22 messages. (He does have an interesting blog, although he hasn’t done much with it lately…)

Also: The New Yorker is now available as an iPad app–publisher Condé Nast used the Wired/Adobe (ADBE) template for this one. So, if you feel like shelling out $4.99 for an issue, head to the Apple (AAPL) iTunes store.

However, most people aren’t likely to carry a Kindle everywhere — it’s too large to fit in a pocket and hogs space in a handbag. Yet they do tote their cellphones everywhere. So, for years, a dedicated minority of folks have been reading books on smart phones and other pocket devices with relatively large screens.