Umm, isn't the whole point of a public protest to show your dedication to a cause?
Oh no, I really believe in anti-globilization, but don't want to run the risk of catching a fire-hose or breathing some teargas... So I'll send a tersely worded internet petition to all my like-minded cowardly friends. That'll teach those nasty corporations that I can't be bullied.
There is value in standing up for something in spite of the danger of being beaten, imprisoned, or killed. There have been anonymous protests for ever e.g. roman graffiti, only problem is that it hasn't ever accomplished anything - unless I missed the chapter where Rome was sacked by anonymous graffiti artists. If you won't risk your skin it must not really be a cause worth fighting for. That is what makes the Rosa Parks, George Washington, John Hancock, and Mahatma Ghandi such icons. They believed in something strongly enough to publicly buck the system.
If you are living in Germany you can actually hire [bbc.co.uk] a protestor to do the dirty work for you - in case online protesting isn't your thing and you don't want to be there yourself, for whatever reason.
Surely the whole point of having a street protest is that it is visible to everyone, and can't be ignored. If you manage to get into a good fight with the police then all the better, because then you're likely to be seen on the TV news.
But if you simply put a video on YouTube, then everyone can simply ignore it. In fact, most politicians are probably unaware of the existence of YouTube. How does that advance your cause?
It doesn't.It just gives some armchair rebels a chance to feel good about themselves by 'supporting' their cause without having to go through the inconvenience of facing confrontation or rebuttal.
It doesn't.It just gives some armchair rebels a chance to feel good about themselves by 'supporting' their cause without having to go through the inconvenience of facing confrontation or rebuttal.
In this country, and many others, there is only one place where one needs to show up in order to make a change (granted it's often not be a big change, but a change never the less), that is, of course, the voting booth.
Oh, it's a change, is it? When American voters fed up with big government and voted in a Republican in 2000, they didn't get the change they wanted. And since the 2006 midterms, when American voters fed up with war, paranoia, and moralism in government voted in Democrats, they haven't gotten that changed. And when American voters in 1892 realized the Republicrats weren't helping them and voted for the Populists, they didn't change anything. Et cetera, et cetera, and others. Voting doesn't do shit except allow you to complain without people saying "you didn't vote, don't complain."
When American voters fed up with big government and voted in a Republican in 2000, they didn't get the change they wanted.
If you have ever believed that voting Republican was really a vote for smaller government, I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you.
And since the 2006 midterms, when American voters fed up with war, paranoia, and moralism in government voted in Democrats, they haven't gotten that changed
4 months and we aren't out of Iraq yet, how shameful. Considering that congress only controls spending, and that the Constitution doesn't explicitly give them the right to end a war, the only effective way to get our troops out is to either attach timetables to a spending bill (done), and/or Impeach the President (they are working on it, but it needs more public support, a
There is much more to it than that. You need to let your legislators know what you care about. You need to pressure them to make decisions that you think are best.
If all you ever do is vote, then your legislator will vote according to what they are hearing from other people[1]-- you've got to ensure that they vote in what you consider the best interests of your locality, county, state, or the whole country.
Write them a letter. Call their office. For local legislators, make an appoin
In this country, and many others, there is only one place where one needs to show up in order to make a change (granted it's often not be a big change, but a change never the less), that is, of course, the voting booth.
I think you mean the grassy knoll.
I voted against Bush twice. Yeah, you heard me right. The Democratic platform of "he's not Bush" worked nicely on me. Once, we actually managed to get the popular vote to come out against him, but the electoral college gave it to him anyway, because that's
Well maybe not every politician today is aware of Youtube, but in about 10 years for sure they will be. Youtube offers the masses editable broadcasting time which allows for clear messages to be sent instantly to millions. Traditional rallies are always at the mercy of the media (often in bed with political parties) to selectively display (or not) your protest & cause.
When the masses start taking action, like boycotting products / companies as a result of Youtube video messages, I think the politicians will start listening & watching.
Several companies including Starbucks already responded via Youtube to videos that people have posted on Youtube against their companies, some with merit, others with less... political campaigns are also increasingly going online as Generation Y (or Z or i?) watches less TV and more and more Youtube.
The Internet remains one of the few but very significant tool left that humanity has to make itself heard to its governments. It is a significant shift of power (to the people) that can not go ignored. Whenelse in history has a single non-elected person been able to influence an entire Nation so fast and so deeply as today with the Internet (and specifically Youtube)?
Youtube and the Internet are the place to rally support for the public rally and of course to record and keep alive that public rally. Just like the TV you can switch off and ignore youtube, a peaceful rally that disrupts traffic flows, and daily operations of business is the only truly effective means of motivating change, and using the Internet the most effective means by which to drum up numbers.
The greater the number the harder it is to ignore and the greater the safety for participants from thugs in
Well if a political statement is turned into a 'viral' youtube video (a la hillary 1984) then it's very likely more people will hear it than a street protest. Of course this just means that in a (mostly?) free country like the US you can have a street protest AND a viral video on the net, why choose just one?
Surely the whole point of having a street protest is that it is visible to everyone
This is the problem with a street protest nowadays. If it doesn't cow-tow to the opinions of mass media moguls, then it is not visible to everyone. I remember when we had over 150,000 people marching in the streets of Melbourne against the Iraq war (biggest ever protest), and you'd read in the news and see on TV: "Thousands marched" or "scores" and not "A hundred and fifty thousand stopped the entire city" which is what actually happened - everything had to stop. However, if you didn't live in Melbourne, you wouldn't have thought much more of it. The politicians knew this and therefore didn't give a rat's about it.
Putting the protest on the net simply makes it even more useless. Unless you go there and look, you won't know.
However, what is working is the fact that more and more people are reading news from non-commercial sources and this is getting politicians a little nervous (hence the drive for censorship).
mmmm, Melbourne has a population of 3.7M. So only 4% of the people came out to protest. And, by your admission and pride, pissed off the other 96%. And that is assuming EVERYONE came from Melbourne and not the surrounding area. Then your percentage drops even more. Plus who says 150K people showed up? Did you sell tickets? Or did you just pull that number out of fantasyland? The nice thing about the Internet is that you can see non-published photos of an event. The more cropped the photos are in the MS
Yes, that is depressing. If it shows up in the media, it will be a blip, or perhaps even with a ridiculing tone, or with footage of the one (quite likely paid) troublemaker who decided to turn up.
Most media are in the business of selling attention. It's not good for business to give it away for free.
So , it only takes 2x the number of young people to join the parties, and vote the old useless crocks out. Or hell, just rake up so much debt, and we can all default at once, and all those old peoples investments go up in smoke.
Its real easy not to buy the corporate world crap, by default young people have more dynamic free thinking minds than old frozen minds.
If the govt does try to 'turn of the internet' , then riots are quite easy to do, there are more people than police or bullets. Or just find out all th
But if you simply put a video on YouTube, then everyone can simply ignore it. In fact, most politicians are probably unaware of the existence of YouTube. How does that advance your cause?
[Shhhhhhh! Don't tell them that, you fool!]
No, YouTube protests are highly dangerous and effective! We shall be developing technological countermeasures shortly. Curse those techies!
But if you simply put a video on YouTube, then everyone can simply ignore it. In fact, most politicians are probably unaware of the existence of YouTube. How does that advance your cause?
Two answers.
Serious answer: It gets the message out. Local protests are, well, local. The internet is global. Politicians will ignore it, but their paid pollsters won't.
Really serious answer: Protests are mostly pointless to the level of idiocy anyway. Ooh, here come the giant puppetheads! I don't care whether people s
I hate to point it out to the general public. Protests tend to accomplish very little. I realized this one day when I was upgrading computers in a government agency the people who can't do anything about it were on floors low enough to read the signs and hear the chants. The people who could do something about it were all the way up and could see a crowd of people but has no idea what they are protesting about. Getting into fights with police you actually get a negative effect from the public and less
Getting into a fight with police just turns law-abiding folks against you, when they otherwise might sympathize with you. It can also get you a nice, juicy felony conviction. Still, protests on YouTube won't carry the weight that a protest in meatspace will have, either positive or negative, for the reasons you cite. What's more, it becomes easy to discount the magnitude of a viewpoint put forth on YouTube, because there are no warm bodies backing it up. It's hard to argue with a quarter million people ma
There is no news coverage by traditional media (papers, tv) of demonstrative acts on the internet. Right now, the best way to make yourself heard is still organising something in the streets. The internet is only helpful to get people to sign petitions and to organise live demonstrations. Of course, politicians are still going to ignore you. A confrontation with the police is really a good thing, because more people will sympathise with you.
... political statements, partisan criticisms and campaigning too.
Here in France as the presidential elections are coming near, the two main candidates, Ségolène Royal [youtube.com] and Nicolas Sarkozy [youtube.com], have more than their fair share of partisan and protest videos on YouTube.
On February 15 2003 the largest global protest ever [wikipedia.org] took place in hundreds of place around the planet. It was against the war on Iraq. They were ignored by politicians. Democracy is dead.
The only thing that i can see to get real change is to have a global general strike. Kick out the politicians everywhere. Institute democracy again. But lets do something different this time. Let's create a system that hasn't been tried before. One where we all have a say.
Theres lots of talk about democracy, but for most people, most of their days are spent at work where there is no democracy. Work is a dictatorship. I'm all for workplace democracy. Non-hierachical collectives running things.
When we have a system where our only say is to elect a so called representative every few years, we should expect to be ignored.
It's time we took back the power we all have. The power found in co-operation.
Time to overthrow these corrupt corporate bastards.
Time to overthrow these corrupt corporate bastards.
While I agree with most of what you say, we should pay attention to how the "corrupt corporate bastards" came about; it's not a problem inherent in our economic system, or neither (to a lesser degree) our political system, so much as the fact that the average citizen doesn't take an active role in politics, and the average consumer doesn't "vote with their dollar". They are content to unthinkingly stick with a imperceptably decending status quo, content t
"In other words, nothing in the system inherently encourages corrupt centralization.." Of course it does. You can vote for big-government Republicans or big-government Democrats... or you can vote for someone who'll lose.
The people who pick the people you get to vote for are the ones who win in a democracy. That's why so many big corporations give money to _both_ Republican and Democrat candidates in US elections.
Democracy is the theory that the opinion of two idiots is worth more than the opinion of one gen
On February 15 2003 the largest global protest ever took place in hundreds of place around the planet. It was against the war on Iraq. They were ignored by politicians. Democracy is dead.
Huh ? Just using Australia as an example (since I'm a local), even being _extremely_ generous and saying a million people in total across the entire country, were protesting, would mean 5% of the population were involved.
Politicians not following the wishes of 5% of the population does not mean "Democracy is dead". Q
saying a million people in total across the entire country, were protesting, would mean 5% of the population were involved.
You're forgetting one very important fact about representative democracy: the whole point is that someone else represents us, because we don't have the time to be involved in day-to-day political governance ourselves. When ANY of us take time out of our lives to correct our politicians, then they need to take notice. It's only when the majority of people who DO something have a differ
You're forgetting one very important fact about representative democracy: the whole point is that someone else represents us, because we don't have the time to be involved in day-to-day political governance ourselves. When ANY of us take time out of our lives to correct our politicians, then they need to take notice. It's only when the majority of people who DO something have a different view, that the minority who do something should be ignored.
So when I take the time to "correct" my local MP about this
ok, so maybe I'm telling you something you could do. You don't have to listen. Actually, yeah, I've got every right to say what I want!
I don't assume anything. I'm just having my say.
What is the future for the common person who yearns to be heard?
They'll create an independent political party based on truth and values, which will be largely ignored in favour of the incumbent elephants of politics who can spend orders of magnitude more on the campaign trail? Or they'll create a small community of supporters, with a dotcom lifestyle and even less effect on the world than the independent party.
In India, we had huge protests last by the student community against the government's hare-brained schemes to introduce reservations in the premier educational institutes.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_India n_anti-reservation_protests/ [wikipedia.org]
The news channels showed police beating up unarmed students who were peacefully protesting. There was a hunger strike by students which went for weeks and was telecast on TV. The members of the National Knowledge Commission resigned in protest.
But the end result was th
If the authorities are checking out people who are planning to protest -where are they looking? on websites, wikis, etc where people are asking to share rides, a place to stay etc. They are already checking the web. Protesting on YouTube is going to be 'safer'? I'd say it singles you out more. Far safer to turn up unannounced as part of a large crowd, you're less likely to get hauled out and disappeared, and more likely to get media coverage as well. Ok you're going to get filmed by the authorities there as
What is the future for the common person who yearns to be heard?
A:
He has no future
The answer is very simple: your voice will always drawn in the sea of other voices. So what if you get a youtube account with potential for your street protest video to be viewed by millions? The same potential belongs to other millions of users of youtube who can post whatever they want with whatever text they want and whatever tags they want. It is true that your chances jumped from none to miniscule, when first videoshari
are only useful if a huge number of people turn out. otherwise, the media outlets and the government ignore a few rabble rousers frim the fringe. something like the philippines people power revolution is a successful example of a protest toppling a government. that snowballed with support from the church and the military and the tacit approval of the majority of the population. rare indeed smaller protests, in comparison, say a million people, are also useful at eliciting media attention and government atten
The internet has been responsible for otherwise unheard people, being able to get together collectively and voice their opinion. Large party politics HATES this because it is a threat to their two-party system. That is why they back all efforts to squash political blogs, and online political movements by trying to have them classified as 'lobbyists'.
As far as I know, there is no negative to giving the average 'joe' a voice when they are competing with two good-ol boy joes (Republicans and Democrats) with mil
At first glance I thought this was the most inane headline I've seen since Discover put "Why Kids Today Love Big Brother" on their cover for a story about MySpace and the loss of privacy a few months back. But if this is just reporting a trend, that is really sad.
I've been saying for a few years now that the only effective protest is a French-style protest where people walk off their jobs to clog the streets and a lot of those jobs are in transport and services so the economy is significantly crippled. Then power notices. Without even knowing the guy, I think I can almost guarantee you that George Bush doesn't give a rat's ass what you say about him on YouTube.
You can go to the internet for _information_ when the Mainstream Media won't give it to you. But _protest_ on the internet? That's just a few million people in the electronic forest baying at the moon. Didn't Nietzsche say something about real men and snarling dogs? Let's kill the fashion of 21st Century Schizoid Boy and get back to actually doing stuff. (Yes, I'm implying, like, back in the _real_ world.)
When many people are demonstrating, they are basically saying that they are willing to put their time, effort and sweat into the cause - they mean business.
When they sit around in their couch and post stuff in YouTube, they aren't making any point at all. They are just whining.
Once upon a time, protestors gladly risked (even baited) arrest to make themselves martyrs for their cause. They were willing to sit in jail and scrifice their time to bring attention to their movement.
Today most protestors seem to do everything they can to protect their anonymity. Being arrested is simply an intolerable inconvenience these days. Self-sacrifice is something to be avoided, not celebrated.
The question is, if YouTube had been available back then, would those protesters have been as ready to hit the streets and get beaten when there was another avenue available to get mass attention? The situation has changed, so that might have some effect on people's actions.
Also, assuming you're talking about the Vietnam War protests in the US, there was a military draft back then. Many of the protesters were literally fighting for their own lives -- if they didn't go out and get beaten by the police, they faced the prospects of going out and getting killed or maimed in southeast Asia. I suspect you'd see protests get a lot more serious in a big hurry if the draft were reinstated to send people over to Iraq.
Want to be heard? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Want to be heard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh no, I really believe in anti-globilization, but don't want to run the risk of catching a fire-hose or breathing some teargas... So I'll send a tersely worded internet petition to all my like-minded cowardly friends. That'll teach those nasty corporations that I can't be bullied.
There is value in standing up for something in spite of the danger of being beaten, imprisoned, or killed. There have been anonymous protests for ever e.g. roman graffiti, only problem is that it hasn't ever accomplished anything - unless I missed the chapter where Rome was sacked by anonymous graffiti artists. If you won't risk your skin it must not really be a cause worth fighting for. That is what makes the Rosa Parks, George Washington, John Hancock, and Mahatma Ghandi such icons. They believed in something strongly enough to publicly buck the system.
Parent
Re:Want to be heard? (Score:4, Informative)
Does the name "Vandals" ring any bells?
Parent
Dial Up Nation (Score:5, Funny)
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1715?show=rep
Evolution of Protest (Score:4, Informative)
What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you simply put a video on YouTube, then everyone can simply ignore it. In fact, most politicians are probably unaware of the existence of YouTube. How does that advance your cause?
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Armchair Rebels only need a curtain to be brave (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Armchair Rebels only need a curtain to be brave (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When American voters fed up with big government and voted in a Republican in 2000, they didn't get the change they wanted.
If you have ever believed that voting Republican was really a vote for smaller government, I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you.
And since the 2006 midterms, when American voters fed up with war, paranoia, and moralism in government voted in Democrats, they haven't gotten that changed
4 months and we aren't out of Iraq yet, how shameful. Considering that congress only controls spending, and that the Constitution doesn't explicitly give them the right to end a war, the only effective way to get our troops out is to either attach timetables to a spending bill (done), and/or Impeach the President (they are working on it, but it needs more public support, a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is much more to it than that. You need to let your legislators know what you care about. You need to pressure them to make decisions that you think are best.
If all you ever do is vote, then your legislator will vote according to what they are hearing from other people[1]-- you've got to ensure that they vote in what you consider the best interests of your locality, county, state, or the whole country.
Write them a letter. Call their office. For local legislators, make an appoin
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you mean the grassy knoll.
I voted against Bush twice. Yeah, you heard me right. The Democratic platform of "he's not Bush" worked nicely on me. Once, we actually managed to get the popular vote to come out against him, but the electoral college gave it to him anyway, because that's
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
When the masses start taking action, like boycotting products / companies as a result of Youtube video messages, I think the politicians will start listening & watching.
Several companies including Starbucks already responded via Youtube to videos that people have posted on Youtube against their companies, some with merit, others with less... political campaigns are also increasingly going online as Generation Y (or Z or i?) watches less TV and more and more Youtube.
The Internet remains one of the few but very significant tool left that humanity has to make itself heard to its governments. It is a significant shift of power (to the people) that can not go ignored. Whenelse in history has a single non-elected person been able to influence an entire Nation so fast and so deeply as today with the Internet (and specifically Youtube)?
Adeptus
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I bet you $1 Youtube is gone in 10 years, or if not gone, certainly forgotten.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The greater the number the harder it is to ignore and the greater the safety for participants from thugs in
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the problem with a street protest nowadays. If it doesn't cow-tow to the opinions of mass media moguls, then it is not visible to everyone. I remember when we had over 150,000 people marching in the streets of Melbourne against the Iraq war (biggest ever protest), and you'd read in the news and see on TV: "Thousands marched" or "scores" and not "A hundred and fifty thousand stopped the entire city" which is what actually happened - everything had to stop. However, if you didn't live in Melbourne, you wouldn't have thought much more of it. The politicians knew this and therefore didn't give a rat's about it.
Putting the protest on the net simply makes it even more useless. Unless you go there and look, you won't know.
However, what is working is the fact that more and more people are reading news from non-commercial sources and this is getting politicians a little nervous (hence the drive for censorship).
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Plus who says 150K people showed up? Did you sell tickets? Or did you just pull that number out of fantasyland?
The nice thing about the Internet is that you can see non-published photos of an event. The more cropped the photos are in the MS
Re: (Score:2)
Most media are in the business of selling attention. It's not good for business to give it away for free.
Inflitrate the old farts... (Score:2)
Or hell, just rake up so much debt, and we can all default at once, and all those old peoples investments go up in smoke.
Its real easy not to buy the corporate world crap, by default young people have more dynamic free thinking minds than old frozen minds.
If the govt does try to 'turn of the internet' , then riots are quite easy to do, there are more people than police or bullets.
Or just find out all th
Re: (Score:2)
[Shhhhhhh! Don't tell them that, you fool!]
No, YouTube protests are highly dangerous and effective! We shall be developing technological countermeasures shortly. Curse those techies!
Signed,
The Man
Re: (Score:2)
Two answers.
Serious answer: It gets the message out. Local protests are, well, local. The internet is global. Politicians will ignore it, but their paid pollsters won't.
Really serious answer: Protests are mostly pointless to the level of idiocy anyway. Ooh, here come the giant puppetheads! I don't care whether people s
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Still, protests on YouTube won't carry the weight that a protest in meatspace will have, either positive or negative, for the reasons you cite. What's more, it becomes easy to discount the magnitude of a viewpoint put forth on YouTube, because there are no warm bodies backing it up. It's hard to argue with a quarter million people ma
Re: (Score:2)
Between "Macaca" and the recent Obama video, it's a pretty good bet that politicians have at least heard of YouTube.
That is, those politicians who realize the Internet isn't, in fact, a truck.
the traditional media (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only protests... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in France as the presidential elections are coming near, the two main candidates, Ségolène Royal [youtube.com] and Nicolas Sarkozy [youtube.com], have more than their fair share of partisan and protest videos on YouTube.
General Strike (Score:3, Insightful)
On February 15 2003 the largest global protest ever [wikipedia.org] took place in hundreds of place around the planet. It was against the war on Iraq. They were ignored by politicians. Democracy is dead.
The only thing that i can see to get real change is to have a global general strike. Kick out the politicians everywhere. Institute democracy again. But lets do something different this time. Let's create a system that hasn't been tried before. One where we all have a say.
Theres lots of talk about democracy, but for most people, most of their days are spent at work where there is no democracy. Work is a dictatorship. I'm all for workplace democracy. Non-hierachical collectives running things.
When we have a system where our only say is to elect a so called representative every few years, we should expect to be ignored.
It's time we took back the power we all have. The power found in co-operation.
Time to overthrow these corrupt corporate bastards.
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree with most of what you say, we should pay attention to how the "corrupt corporate bastards" came about; it's not a problem inherent in our economic system, or neither (to a lesser degree) our political system, so much as the fact that the average citizen doesn't take an active role in politics, and the average consumer doesn't "vote with their dollar". They are content to unthinkingly stick with a imperceptably decending status quo, content t
Re: (Score:2)
Of course it does. You can vote for big-government Republicans or big-government Democrats... or you can vote for someone who'll lose.
The people who pick the people you get to vote for are the ones who win in a democracy. That's why so many big corporations give money to _both_ Republican and Democrat candidates in US elections.
Democracy is the theory that the opinion of two idiots is worth more than the opinion of one gen
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
On February 15 2003 the largest global protest ever took place in hundreds of place around the planet. It was against the war on Iraq. They were ignored by politicians. Democracy is dead.
Huh ? Just using Australia as an example (since I'm a local), even being _extremely_ generous and saying a million people in total across the entire country, were protesting, would mean 5% of the population were involved.
Politicians not following the wishes of 5% of the population does not mean "Democracy is dead". Q
except that people are busy (Score:2)
You're forgetting one very important fact about representative democracy: the whole point is that someone else represents us, because we don't have the time to be involved in day-to-day political governance ourselves. When ANY of us take time out of our lives to correct our politicians, then they need to take notice. It's only when the majority of people who DO something have a differ
Re: (Score:2)
You're forgetting one very important fact about representative democracy: the whole point is that someone else represents us, because we don't have the time to be involved in day-to-day political governance ourselves. When ANY of us take time out of our lives to correct our politicians, then they need to take notice. It's only when the majority of people who DO something have a different view, that the minority who do something should be ignored.
So when I take the time to "correct" my local MP about this
Re: (Score:2)
Who says the politicians should be kicked? A global general strike is a strike that should be commited by EVERYBODY.
uhhh, that is kinda what a general strike is - a strike by EVERYBODY
Who are you to tell everybody what to do?
What kind of comment is that? I'm not telling everybody what to do. I'm merely making a comment on slashdot. Crikey mate.
Since when a business is a democracy
I never said it was a democracy. I said it was a dictatorship (mostly. There are lots of co-operatives, and lots of ot
Re: (Score:2)
I don't assume anything. I'm just having my say.
come & see the violence inherent in the system (Score:2)
Politics (Score:2)
They'll create an independent political party based on truth and values, which will be largely ignored in favour of the incumbent elephants of politics who can spend orders of magnitude more on the campaign trail? Or they'll create a small community of supporters, with a dotcom lifestyle and even less effect on the world than the independent party.
Yeah, I'm pretty damn cynical about politics.
Nothing helps (Score:2, Informative)
The news channels showed police beating up unarmed students who were peacefully protesting. There was a hunger strike by students which went for weeks and was telecast on TV. The members of the National Knowledge Commission resigned in protest.
But the end result was th
Youtube protest chant (Score:4, Funny)
We're here, we're buffering,
We don't want any more suffering!
online can be traced... (Score:2)
answer (Score:2)
A:
The answer is very simple: your voice will always drawn in the sea of other voices. So what if you get a youtube account with potential for your street protest video to be viewed by millions? The same potential belongs to other millions of users of youtube who can post whatever they want with whatever text they want and whatever tags they want. It is true that your chances jumped from none to miniscule, when first videoshari
Protest by proxy (Score:2)
real protests (Score:2)
smaller protests, in comparison, say a million people, are also useful at eliciting media attention and government atten
wow could we get ANY lazier? (Score:2)
Giving commoners a voice since 1999! (Score:2)
Large party politics HATES this because it is a threat to their two-party system. That is why they back all efforts to squash political blogs, and online political movements by trying to have them classified as 'lobbyists'.
As far as I know, there is no negative to giving the average 'joe' a voice when they are competing with two good-ol boy joes (Republicans and Democrats) with mil
So, then, the protestors have already lost? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been saying for a few years now that the only effective protest is a French-style protest where people walk off their jobs to clog the streets and a lot of those jobs are in transport and services so the economy is significantly crippled. Then power notices. Without even knowing the guy, I think I can almost guarantee you that George Bush doesn't give a rat's ass what you say about him on YouTube.
You can go to the internet for _information_ when the Mainstream Media won't give it to you. But _protest_ on the internet? That's just a few million people in the electronic forest baying at the moon. Didn't Nietzsche say something about real men and snarling dogs? Let's kill the fashion of 21st Century Schizoid Boy and get back to actually doing stuff. (Yes, I'm implying, like, back in the _real_ world.)
Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
When they sit around in their couch and post stuff in YouTube, they aren't making any point at all. They are just whining.
Gut-less new generation of protestors (Score:4, Insightful)
Today most protestors seem to do everything they can to protect their anonymity. Being arrested is simply an intolerable inconvenience these days. Self-sacrifice is something to be avoided, not celebrated.
Ironic, amusing, and sad at the same time.
Re:Gut-less new generation of protestors (Score:4, Interesting)
The question is, if YouTube had been available back then, would those protesters have been as ready to hit the streets and get beaten when there was another avenue available to get mass attention? The situation has changed, so that might have some effect on people's actions.
Also, assuming you're talking about the Vietnam War protests in the US, there was a military draft back then. Many of the protesters were literally fighting for their own lives -- if they didn't go out and get beaten by the police, they faced the prospects of going out and getting killed or maimed in southeast Asia. I suspect you'd see protests get a lot more serious in a big hurry if the draft were reinstated to send people over to Iraq.
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