Baratunde Thurston, whose byline you might recognize from The Onion, has an interesting piece up on VanityFair.com about what Martin Luther King would make of Twitter if he was alive today. “I think King would have used the medium just as he and the movement used television,” he writes. “They employed dramatic tactics and imagery to get the world to take notice and steadily bend the arc of public opinion toward justice. King and indeed everyone in the movement would post photos of children being brutalized, would organize flashmobs of direct-action simultaneously around the country for even more dramatic effect, and might use the speed of the service to outmaneuver opponents and connect with a broadening coalition.”
While we’re not entirely convinced that the civil rights leader would be a fan of Foursquare or hashtag games, it is kind of cool to think about how he could have used the service to directly mobilize supporters, isn’t it? View some sample tweets that Thurston cooked up after the jump.
