What frustrates me most about on-line petitions and whatnot is that these same social networking tools have the power to truly aid in activism. You can meet others with similar feelings, plan real-world protests and events, and actually get out and do things. Or...you can click a button and feel good for a few minutes that you sort of not really did something. Unfortunately, once people have done the latter, they don't feel the need to do the former anymore.
(And it's not just Facebook. I stopped doing Seattle protest rallies because I realized it didn't matter. The media didn't care, the police were on our side (one queer rights march I did, the police were ringing their bike bells in chime with the chants), and the whole thing had a total preaching to the choir feel to it.
Then again, I've switched more to an in-the-system, behind-the-scenes sort of activism. I'd like to think it helps more. Maybe in Canada, it does. Plus, I hear Ottawa's nice in the .. five minutes of spring and fall, at least.
The media in Seattle care a little bit about war protest actions, but it gets hairy rapidly, since some of the most vocal anti-war groups with presences there are wings of the US Communist Party. Not the Socialists; the for-real Communists. I found this out when WAMFSO was discussing protests to attend and the people there did NOT want to get involved with those events.
Media coverage of the last ANSWER-driven protest was essentially not there, as far as I know. I recall some media presence at the last MFSO thing I did. Queer rights, well... (western) Washington is already considerably gay-friendly, if not explicitly gender-variant-supportive, and marching in solidarity with people in distant cities always feels like a lesser statement than being on the battleground. Critical Mass is mostly a friendly event in Seattle (not so in MPLS and SFO, among others.) NYC Critical Mass gets broken up by the cops so effectively that there's really no point, given the abstract quality of the statement and the extent to which non-car conveyances
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Hm. The war protest marches I did in Seattle were .. boring, honestly. This was 2002 or 2003, though, before the Iraq war started (augh I really just want to say dammit, I told you so to the world) and in its early days, so maybe things are crazier now
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One of the many eye-opening things about this book is the discussion of the normalization of RNC-protest style tactics. I did not know this, but a similar... cage, pretty much, for containing protestors was used to distance the NYC protest against the Beijing Olympics from the Chinese consulate in Manhattan. It's one thing when police in riot gear show up to peace rallies, and another thing when legally exercising the right to assemble involves paying permit fees a couple weeks in advance (for "administrative costs", whatEVER), bargaining for an allotment of time to do so, stuffing the protestors literally inside a cage, and basically circumscribing the whole event so that no one needs see it or be in any way affected by it. That part is not yet universal, but it's gathering popularity with city councils, and it just breaks my head that I have no idea how the laws governing free assembly are made.
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(And it's not just Facebook. I stopped doing Seattle protest rallies because I realized it didn't matter. The media didn't care, the police were on our side (one queer rights march I did, the police were ringing their bike bells in chime with the chants), and the whole thing had a total preaching to the choir feel to it.
Then again, I've switched more to an in-the-system, behind-the-scenes sort of activism. I'd like to think it helps more. Maybe in Canada, it does. Plus, I hear Ottawa's nice in the .. five minutes of spring and fall, at least.
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Media coverage of the last ANSWER-driven protest was essentially not there, as far as I know. I recall some media presence at the last MFSO thing I did. Queer rights, well... (western) Washington is already considerably gay-friendly, if not explicitly gender-variant-supportive, and marching in solidarity with people in distant cities always feels like a lesser statement than being on the battleground. Critical Mass is mostly a friendly event in Seattle (not so in MPLS and SFO, among others.) NYC Critical Mass gets broken up by the cops so effectively that there's really no point, given the abstract quality of the statement and the extent to which non-car conveyances ( ... )
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