Malcolm Gladwell is once again stirring controversy on the Internets with an article in The New Yorker magazine in which he sets out to debunk the notion that social media will transform social activism. Lots of people are taking issue with Gladwell's piece, as he surely hoped, and I am adding my voice to the chorus: Malcolm Gladwell, you naughty intellectual imp, you are totally and utterly wrong. That said, ironically I agree with what I believe to be Gladwell's real argument.

The figures are in, and "The Social Network" is a hit, taking in $23 million in its first weekend as 2.9 million moviegoers flocked to theaters to see the (often unflattering, possibly wildly inaccurate) retelling of the early days of Facebook. Naturally this raises the question of whether the film's not-so-complimentary portrayals of Facebook execs -- especially CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- could in some way damage the company by, for example, fostering negative perceptions that cause people to abandon the site. In short, the answer is "no." But that doesn't mean Mr. Zuckerberg and other top execs shouldn't be watching …

Forget all those pleas for civility based on simple respect for other human beings. There's an even better reason to watch what you say about other people online: one of them might just snap and try to kill you. And don't assume simple things like distance or sanity will protect you.

A few days ago an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide after his roommate surreptitiously broadcast him "making out with a dude" on the Internet and publicized it on his Twitter account. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, and another Rutgers student, Molly Wei (both 18) are being charged with invasion of privacy, carrying a potential sentence of up to five years in prison. Clearly this is a tragic situation all round -- for Clementi, the victim of callous adolescent bullying converging with digital media, but also for the alleged culprits, who probably had no idea of the stakes they were …

The Internets are abuzz with some new findings from Forrester Research suggesting that, while the number of people using social media may still be growing, the number of people who are actually creating original content has leveled off in the last few years. In fact, Forrester found that the proportion of "online creators" -- meaning, people who actively maintain a blog, upload videos and music, or write articles -- in the U.S. social media audience dipped from 24% to 23% from 2009-2010. The Forrester finding naturally raises the question "why?" It also throws new light on the evolving structure of …

Oh, Facebook. You know how you were trying to clean up your image, especially regarding online safety for children? Especially protecting kids from sexual predators? Well, I'm no PR whiz, but I feel like you may want to reconsider letting the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) use Facebook to organize local chapters and share tips on their nefarious pursuit of underage love.

If someone made a not-so-complimentary movie about me someday, I imagine I would be pretty pissed off. On one hand, if the movie is inaccurate, it must be infuriating to have one's reputation wrongly besmirched in front of millions of people, with no recourse. On the other hand, if it's accurate -- well, they nailed you, and no one likes to get called out on their misdoings. And if it happens to be somewhere in between -- an unflattering mix of truth and falsehood -- you probably end up where Mark Zuckerberg appears to be now regarding "The Social Network": …

Western civilization collapsed briefly yesterday when Facebook became unavailable to many users for periods of up to several hours. The outage, which the company hasn't deigned to explain, enforced an unexpected period of social media "cold turkey" similar to recent "no social media" experiments conducted by colleges -- albeit unannounced and obviously on a much larger scale.

Politics is the third rail of the business world; I always find it interesting how people go to great lengths to avoid talking about politics at industry conferences and meet-ups, where the topic is almost as verboten as, say, sex lives and drug habits. On that note, I'd like to issue this disclaimer ahead of time: I think both of our major political parties have failed disgracefully and we'd be better off governed by the cast of Jersey Shore.

Social media is approaching an important juncture, as big established networks seem to be reaching saturation and smaller networks are also stabilizing. It appears unlikely that audiences will continue to grow at the same rate that they have over the last decade, suggesting that future growth will focus on convincing under-utilizing groups to join, or "doubling up" by convincing existing users to join multiple networks.