America Is A Terrible Country

[Kim]

Originally Posted by stefan

they also made major use of traditional methods of protest. Or did you forget about when Egypt actively shut down as many social media networks as they could, leaving the protesters to, you know, not rely on the internet to coordinate?

Wheeee, and this in fact doesn't negate the online action they did! Which was the point Pocheros was making! Which was obvious!

no shit.

I think you do not understand that my entire point was that people try to use social media as a replacement for action, which is a bit hard to quantify since nobody actively tracts unacted protests in potentia, but there is certainly a massive and unignorable population of people who claim to be activists while quantifiably doing Not A Fucking Thing to justify the label aside from wasting bandwidth with reblogs and making a shitload of noise.

And you acted as though there were somehow a meaningful decrease in protests happening as a result of online action and that people were in fact doing less as a result of online action.

Which was a baseless claim you made to start a meaningless argument with Poch.

And I pointed this out already.

Poch made the point they did good. You tried to argue "Nuh-uh!! Cuz Tumblrs are lazy!!"

Her point had evidence.

Yours doesn't.

Move on.

[rpgdemon]

Originally Posted by stefan

Effectively 98% of tumblr is more or less living proof that you are wrong. It's not stopping action, but its a very real thing that people who might otherwise have done at least some small part in support of a cause are now content to just spend time "signal boosting" and calling themselves a helper.



Dead serious, in the last ten years, how many social movements have received success due to internet awareness raising where they would have otherwise failed? Occupy was a failure, Assange is stuck in an embassy while Wikileaks is rapidly fading into obscurity, countless movements so heavily based in signal boosting have imploded on themselves because of a lack of actual action.

I didn't read the rest of the thread, don't know if I agree with anyone as such, but this is wrong. Look at the Arab spring, seriously. There was a whole book written on it as it was happening, Sandstorm. New media is leading to increased social activism, as people can actually communicate with eachother, see what's going on, and try to change things.

[synkr0nized]

Methinks an attempt to mock Twitter Activists and Facebook Heroes has backfired tremendously.

[CABAL49]

Social activism that is happening in places not the West. Also it would be a gross oversimplification to think that the reason Arab Spring happened was because they had twitter. Did these new medias aid Arab Spring in whatever it is going to end up being? Yes, but it is hardly the example to go by. Arab Spring is too often oversimplified, when it is an extremely complicated and unfinished thing.

[stefan]

Originally Posted by Kim

Wheeee, and this in fact doesn't negate the online action they did! Which was the point Pocheros was making! Which was obvious!

I don't get if you legitimately think that online action was the catalyst for the Arab Spring and other movements or if you are trying to argue something entirely different, or what. Because twitter et al were tools used by a revolution that was already going to happen because of years of social buildup, not because somebody made an angry post about Mubarak being a shit-eating piece of fuck and a lot of people simultaneously decided they agreed.

Social Media very likely did not have nearly as much of an effect as you seem to think they did, as they effectively functioned as a glorified telegraph system that was cast aside when they became impractical.

And you acted as though there were somehow a meaningful decrease in protests happening as a result of online action and that people were in fact doing less as a result of online action.

its certainly the case that the activism scene in the first world has gone tits up in the worst fucking way, and considering the utter social backslide in all forms civil rights related, there's not a lot you can say to counteract that.

Yeah, we're done here.

[Loyal]

Originally Posted by stefan

I think you do not understand that my entire point was that people try to use social media as a replacement for action, which is a bit hard to quantify since nobody actively tracts unacted protests in potentia, but there is certainly a massive and unignorable population of people who claim to be activists while quantifiably doing Not A Fucking Thing to justify the label aside from wasting bandwidth with reblogs and making a shitload of noise.

KONY 2012

[stefan]

Originally Posted by Loyal

KONY 2012

This one is great because I was looking for info on it for examples of reblog "activism" to see if it ever went anywhere, and as far as the internet is concerned it seems to have ceased to exist after march 2012. No articles, no time stamped mockery, no diehard rebloggers updating, nothing.

Truly, a champion effort from the social media progress engine.

[Osterbaum]

What we need to do is organize and for that the internet is fucking amazing.

[Marelo]

Like, Stefan, I see your point, really I (think I) do. But I don't think it's a problem with the nature of the internet. People who are reblog activists were probably not going to do anything about these causes even without the internet on which to reblog.

You have examples of people doing that kind of shit, yeah, but you haven't shown an increase or decrease in actual activism or its rates of success related to said kind of shit.

I find it really hard to swallow that activism is somehow stifled by there being more and freer means for activists (real ones) to talk to each other.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

People have been trying to shut prisons down through campaigns pretty solidly for the last 30 or so years. They have achieved negative results. Because a bunch of random academics and ne'er-do-wells ain't as good at cultural brainwashing as an entire socio-economic system.
Same with every other issue related to wealth/power disparity which have gotten demonstrably worse over the last 30 years despite massive protests, attempts at systematic change. It'll work the next time we try it though cause this time we're going to kidnap the confidence fairy from the republican camp.