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Protests Move From the Streets To YouTube
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?"
Create a blog or upload some videos. Doesn't mean that people will want to hear what you've got to say, however.
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
Aussies can use YouTube to protest against the lack of decent broadband. Very... slowly...
l ies
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1715?show=rep
If you are living in Germany you can actually hire 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?
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.
assignment != equality != identity
Here in France as the presidential elections are coming near, the two main candidates, Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, have more than their fair share of partisan and protest videos on YouTube.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
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.
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.
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/
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 that the government got its way and passed the law, despite overwhelming opposition from the academic community. I wonder how YouTube can help, when primetime news couldnt ?
We're here, we're buffering,
We don't want any more suffering!
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
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 millions and millioins of dollars in backing.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
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.)
1) Obtain foreign funding: KGB, Soros, PLA, Wahhabis, you know the drill.
2) Round up some useful idiots.
3) Print illiterut signs.
4) Compose mindless chant.
6) Ensure media camera angles and editing will keep all 71/72 of your protesters in the frame (with 3/12412 counter-protestors). (This is a gimme, you don't have to do anything. It's handled, dude or dudette!)
5) Let your well-reasoned position be heard! If you don't know what it is, those nice people at (1) above can help.
--
phunctor
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.
With fewer in-person protests, our police force can now better spend their time doing what they go to work for: catching theives, kidnappers, rapers, murderes, etc. and less time baby-sitting whiners, complainers, the un-informed, and the ignorant.
Should also help cut down on the trash and garbage left around following a protest, cut down on traffic jams, leave shop owners able to sleep at night knowing their store hasn't been smashed and looted, and actually promote a challenge-response over issues, rather than a one-way-we-scream-you-listen(or ignore) system that protests bring.
Protests have never worked. Why do we still waste our time on them?
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.
Ironic, amusing, and sad at the same time.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Breaking "Fake" news, Police march on Youtube headquarters and take their server farm down with a water-cannon. The protest about police brutality appears to have been ended with the loss of only one life. Police are not releasing the name of the victim but indicate one staff member at youtube unfortunately suffered a massive coronary after all of the magic smoke escaped from his computer room. Reporters caught 6 paramedics on tape attempting to carry what appeared to be an obese sysadmin from the building to an ambulance. Protesters could not comment right away, as they have to go upstairs and ask theoir mom's permission before talking to people in real life.
I made this up. I don't condone cruelty to computers of any sort.
"Mounting your political message online is also safer in countries where taking part in a protest can result in your death or injury"
There are people around the world (rhymes with CHINA) who will never see the light of day again, because words they posted on the internet were traced to them. The mode of protest is not as important as that it gets done.