Cross-posted from the Public Affairs Council blog
It’s hard not to laugh at the Occupy Wall Street campaign, the bizarre group of protesters who recently shut down the Brooklyn Bridge and, dressed as corporate zombies, staggered past the New York Stock Exchange, chanting, “How to fix the deficit: End the war, tax the rich!”
But there was something familiar in the media interviews. “We want a voice, and our voice has slowly been degraded over time,” a St. Louis man told USA Today. An unemployed woman from Connecticut said in The Wall Street Journal that too many people have been dismissive of the protests. “The only way to do it is to show them, to make them open their eyes.”
Substitute the word “government” for “corporation” in the signs and slogans, give them a wardrobe change and a few gray hairs, and they’d look a lot like the early tea party demonstrators.
There are major differences, of course, beginning with the fact that conservative politicians ran to the front of the tea party line to promote their causes. Many liberal politicians have been skittish about being associated with the folks sleeping in a Manhattan park since Sept. 17. While the tea party founders actually organized protests, the group behind the Wall Street demonstrations decided to bring people together first and then figure out its demands later.
But the anger and desire to take back power from the powerful is the same. And, as the demonstrations spread to Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and other cities, major unions like the AFL-CIO and advocacy groups like MoveOn.org are now on board. The mainstream media — no doubt ready to make the same tea party comparison — will surely follow, especially as we enter an election year. The politicians won’t be far behind. (more…)
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Cutting Off #Wisconsin (Tech President)
The education labor activist site, Defend Wisconsin (DefendWisconsin.org), was blocked from the “guest” WiFi network inside the Wisconsin State Capitol Building for a period of time.
Mobile Tech Activists Wary of State Department Cash (Wired)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she’d make available $25 million for a “venture capital approach” to underwriting new tools to keep the Internet open in repressive nations.
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
State Dept. Spokesman Heavily Uses Twitter to Battle WikiLeaks Fallout (The Hill)
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has been employing Twitter to hit back at the latest WikiLeaks document dump that began nearly two weeks ago.
Networks and Hierarchies: A Typology of Digital Activism Today (Tech President)
A typology of how networks affect hierarchies in the digital world.
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Are Net-Neutrality-Advocating Redditors About to Start a PAC? (Tech President)
A discussion of whether users of a social bookmarking service can transfer their online common interests into a mix of online and offline political activism.
Foursquare Propels Local Homelessness Advocacy Effort (ClickZ)
The Urban Ministries of Durham to use Foursquare to raise awareness of homelessness.
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Twitter May Raise Another $200 Million (Business Insider)
Twitter has many interested investors and the company is looking into another round of financing.
Florida Activists Read Between the Lines on Foreclosure Paperwork (Washington Post)
Activists using websites to aggregate and analyze court documents related to faulty foreclosures.
First published on Partnership for a More Perfect Union.
You know something has had an impact on you when you’re still thinking about it weeks after the fact. And what happened recently on YouTube got me thinking.
Members of Congress and their staffs have gotten used to a world where a constituent writes a postal letter or e-mail or calls the office and the office responds in written form to the citizen’s concerns. One of the challenges that social media creates for congressional offices is that they can no longer just wait for constituent communication to come to them. They now need to monitor external sources to capture it all.
As Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers said in our “Inside the Hill” web series, “the world has changed.”
What punctuated this for me was the flurry of activity around a Senate vote regarding the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. Regardless of what side of this sensitive social issue you come down on, something happened that should be instructive to Members of Congress, advocacy organizations, and citizens alike.
The Service members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) is an organization dedicated to ending DADT. They recently enlisted Lady Gaga, of…well…Lady Gaga fame, to create and post a YouTube video asking her considerable fan base to call their Senators to request an end to the ban on openly gay service members. This video is interesting from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that, when she calls her Senators live in the video, she never actually gets through to either one because the volume of calls to the Senate’s phone system resulted in a busy signal from one and an at-capacity mailbox from the other. What happens next is even more interesting.
(more…)
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Facebook Groups Give Rise to Social Nicheworking
(Brian Solis)
Will Facebook’s revamped Groups feature better encourage community engagement?
Global Youth Are Confident of Their Power to Change the World – and Feel It’s Their Duty to Do So (PR Newswire)
A recent study reveals that Millenials view social media as more powerful than politics or corporations for changing the world.
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
How to Integrate Social Media With Traditional Media (Social Media Examiner)
Fully integrating social media into your communications efforts takes more than setting up a Facebook page.
Why Social Media Is Reinventing Activism (Mashable)
Mashable explores how social media is impacting the face of activism today.
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Buzz Abounds for Activism, Media and Politics Summit in DC (OhMyGov!)
Activists, politicians & journalists gathered last week in DC for the first Activism, Media and Politics Summit, generating interesting conversation on the future of the digital realm.
‘I Like It On’ Facebook Status Update Goes Viral: What It Means (Huffington Post)
October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and women are showing their support on Facebook by leaving men questioning.
Written by Kate Kaye, ClickZ Politics & Advocacy
The tea party movement, and the social media activism horse it rode in on, are both facing skepticism from influential thinkers including Malcolm Gladwell.
To Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers,” online advocacy and cause-related actions in social media are moot compared to activism that propelled social upheavals like the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Social media evangelists, he wrote in this week’s The New Yorker, “seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.”
As Gladwell dismissed “the outsized enthusiasm for social media” in his essay, another leading thinker ripped into one of today’s most-hyped social media activism stories – that of the tea party movement’s vaunted follower counts.
Micah Sifry, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and a proponent of digital and social technologies in politics, challenged recent reports claiming Republicans are trouncing Democrats when it comes to their social media followings. Sifry argued in a recent post on PDF’s TechPresident site, “while I don’t doubt that there is more enthusiasm on the right side of the aisle about the coming November election, I don’t think the online metrics are really so lopsided.”
To read the entire article on ClickZ, click here.
