Protests Move From the Streets To YouTube 156
weighn writes "One factor driving the move of political statements to YouTube, and away from old-style street protest, is that on the Internet the chances of being personally associated with a protest are lower. Mounting your political message online is also safer in countries where taking part in a protest can result in your death or injury at the hands of your country's army. We've seen how street protests and online polls alike are being shunted aside and ignored. What is the future for the common person who yearns to be heard?"
Want to be heard? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Interesting)
Indeed - the people making these videos are modelling them on O'Reilly, etc.
Re:General Strike (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". Quite the opposite, in fact.
To further drive the point home, pretty much every democratic country involved in Iraq has had an election since the invasion, and not many of them had a change of Government. Most of them weren't even _close_ to a change of Government. Whatever you might personally think the community feels about the Iraq war, the evidence suggests most of them simply don't care.
(To avoid pointless flames, I'm going to say up front that I don't think we should have gotten involved in Iraq. We should just build a great big wall around the whole Middle East and let the fuckers wipe themselves out.)
Re:Armchair Rebels only need a curtain to be brave (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 how the electoral college works - it's there to fuck us. Then, the election was neatly stolen with the assistance of various voting machines. I'm not even talking about the amazing insecurity of the Diebold machines here, I'm talking about things like poor precincts in florida flipping a switch that caused the scan-tron machines to silently accept and discard mismarked ballots rather than rejecting them, whereas in richer, whiter places, it was set to reject them.
Voting? Pah. That's not going to do one fucking thing. I'll still do it, just to keep up appearances. And I'm certainly not going to be assassinating anyone. But I feel pretty strongly that is the only way to make a significant difference in our system at this point. Does it really matter which group of rich fuckers that don't actually give a shit about the people is in office?
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.