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Daniel Pocok blogs about the misguided picture that most people have over social media. These web sites turn out to be an effective means to monitor and control the population. One key point he makes is that the public ignores the ease with which social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, facilitate the effective kettling and surveillance of activists, campaigners, and other groups. He writes:
Facebook helps kettle activists in their arm chair. The police state can gather far more data about them, while their impact is even more muted than if they ventured out of their home.
And further down he asks,
Is somebody who takes pictures of you and insists on sharing them with hundreds of people, tagging your face for the benefit of biometric profiling systems, really a friend?
The addictive nature of these so-called services combined with the network effect make it really hard for people to escape, but the negative aspects really suggest that they should make the effort.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @02:43PM (4 children)
We've learned that the famous mass action of fifty years ago was fairly effective (though not as much as many of its cheerleaders would have had us believe).
These days mass action that isn't naked violence doesn't seem to do much. It's a photo op for a sympathetic politician who, half the time, achieves nothing much.
The Occupy movement mostly succeeded in convincing themselves that they were totally changing the world, while convincing the rest of the world that they were sad nuts who couldn't organise a dog fight if they had a bitch in heat to get things started.
The Tea Party movement showed up - but then got very politically active off the streets, and had substantial influence.
BLM has largely succeeded at polarising opinion based on their public activities. Actual legislation on holding police more responsible for their actions is presently missing.
The WTO protest group haven't really managed to change the world.
And so on ... kettling people in their airmchairs is not a major change in their effectiveness.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 03 2017, @04:37PM (1 child)
BLM are a bunch of violent shitheads and like Antifa are one of those groups that came out of nowhere, part of Grand Usurper-for-life Baraq Hussein Soetoro's plan to implement a globalist Operation Gladio within the United States. Although there is some degree of control, as with our "moderate rebels" overseas, these people are driven by violence first and ideology is secondary. Fortunately, Trump won, so these groups can no longer stay legitimate by intimidation and labeling everything "racist." Now they're relegated into the shadows and dismissed as jokes.
BLM and Antifa don't have neither leaders or organizers -- they have handlers.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday July 03 2017, @05:16PM
I can't help it, but every time I see BLM, I think of the Bureau of Land Management first. Land-use controversies come to mind, with Federal overreach as a theme. Mostly, it's armed standoffs with ranchers, even though there aren't many.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @10:49PM (1 child)
Have you been to a university lately? Or Wikipedia? Or Reddit? Or looked at the HR practices of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Github, Mozilla, etc? All of that lunatic nonsense that we laughed at when Ketchup brought it out at OWS is mandatory. You have to swear to it or they will kick you out. Tenure does not protect you.
That would be "totally changing the world" and not for the better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @03:25AM
That would be a lot more impressive if it were demonstrably that public mass action movement that both demanded and extracted those concessions.
Instead, that particular goal has been on the public's radar since the days when Hillary Clinton first made "political correctness" a phrase in the public eye, and has been an incremental push ratcheted up by various academic consciousness-raisers since at least the '70s. It was well under way by the time that Occupy occupied anything.