Motivated+Connected=Activists
The Associated Press reports on the anti-Obamacare town-hall protests:
The emerging protest movement is almost the mirror image of the grass-roots campaign that helped sweep Obama into office by pulling in people who’d never been politically active. This time Obama is seeing the other side of what can happen when people are motivated, connect over the Internet and seemingly reach a tipping point that turns them from onlookers into activists.
Don Surber comments on the town hall meetings: “Congressmen wanted to turn them into rallies for health care. That may be the political boo-boo of the year.”
In the age of transparency, when motivated people can easily connect via the web and use social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and blogs to become instant activists, the old methods of stage-managing events such as town-hall meetings to turn them into rallies as political theater isn’t going to work. The old spin methods don’t work any more. The viral nature of online communications has seen to that.
read moreFirst Iran, Now China
Social networking sites Twitter, YouTube are a “force for revolution,” says the New York Daily News, noting that China is the latest country where social media is both helping organize anti-government protests and helping get the news to the outside world past government censors.
read moreMeshLinks
