The establishment has looked upon the social media based network protest movements in recent years with equal parts of awe and dread.
One the one hand, you have the Tea Party that went from rallying anonymous individuals, to taking key primaries, to electing an anti-establishment president and controlling congress. The Occupy movement, on the other hand, went after the big banks who benefited from the bail out, spawning Black Lives Matter and burdening the nation with social justice before finally burning out completely with the Bernie Sanders campaign that was denied the nomination for president by insiders of the Democratic party.
Why did one succeed and the other fail miserably? Zeynep Tufecki has been studying alternative media based protest and has come to some very interesting observations about why they seem to blow up from out of no where then collapse into nothing just as quickly.
Her Book “Twitter and Tear Gas” on Amazon Here
Can you imagine where things would be if the media had been biased to the tea party and actually reported on the
Multiple scandals that are the oblowme legacy?
Thanks for the link, will listen later this evening.
Another entertaining comparison: Tea Party vs Coffee Party
Real vs fake
I’m not used to an academic giving The Tea Party credit for being a legitimate force.
Zeynep Tufecki does.
She calls The Tea Party movement one of the two most powerful movements of the last fifty years. (Gay rights is the other.)
She even makes the case that we pretty much put President Trump into office.
(I guess we should give the gay rights crowd credit for getting a gay black man elected President.)
She goes into depth on the mechanics of movements yet misses the point why the tea party had success. It’s success was due to the fact that the people engaged were the rock solid base of this republic, the working taxpayer who has been either ignored or taken for granted. Not the kind of fringe crackpots that need teargassing. That tends to get the political class’s attention.
Too much beating around the bush and not getting to the point. I ended searching through the video expecting pertinent information and I got none.
The talk was loaded with interesting observations on the new media driven movement.
1.) They tend to be quick wide and shallow, with little staying power.
2.) There are three forms; movements of narrative (gay marriage), movements of disruption (occupy) and movements of institutional change (Tea Party)
3.) Authoritarian governments are getting more sophisticated at disrupting and deflating social media driven movements.
4.) The social media outlets (Facebook and Twitter) are designed to hold your attention, not enable your movement to become more organized.
5.)Starting a movement is easy, marches can be set up quickly, but without more organization the effort becomes stale and directionless. Tea Party was different because the participants understood how the political system works and were able to advance their objectives through the institutions of elections (nominations, elections, policy).
I found the book in PDF online if you want a copy for free
https://www.twitterandteargas.org/downloads/twitter-and-tear-gas-by-zeynep-tufekci.pdf
The Tea Party was always there, unnamed and growing in frustration. It took the new Media (Yes, I’m looking at you IOTWReport) to help it awaken, become aware and a force for change.
Tea party had jobs.
Tea Party is peaceful.
I remember the banner the guys from Montana carried during the 9-12 rally march toward the capitol:
“This time we came unarmed. Don’t make us come back.”
Tea Party = quality people.
Occupy = people of zero quality.