wholly2b - Slashdot User

Comment I've been wondering this myself (Score 2, Insightful) 3

by wholly2b on Friday August 10, 2007 @07:45PM (#20190697) Attached to: Can the internet enable direct action offline?

I spend a lot of time reading stories on digg, and there are so, so, so many fed up Americans. I have a growing suspicion that we are the silent majority -- I mean, what is Bush's approval rating, 20%? It's easy to sit at your computer and talk about change; it's a different thing going out and effecting it. The internet has incredible potential to organize the millions of angry Americans, without the need of a supervising organization. If there were a centralized place where people only talked about change and how to make it happen, and it caught on, well.... then something glorious might happen. In the meantime, this general strike is a fantastic idea. Spread the word, far and wide.

Submission + - Can the internet enable direct action offline? 3

Submitted by

notque

on Friday August 10, 2007 @02:26PM

notque writes: "We are sitting in a time with so many political scandals, and some would say an illegal war. You would think that given these facts the United States would be a hotbed of political activity and protest. So far this hasn't occurred, although people continue to do difficult work. There are many websites that attempt to coordinate political activity, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to show for it. Can the internet actually enable direct action offline? What are some ways that this could be carried out? On another website, digg, there was an article concerning a general strike on 09/11/07 that received 4600 diggs, so it seems that people want to do something, but feel isolated and alone. Does the internet help foster this? Noam Chomsky once said, "By margins that are now so overwhelming that it's even front page news, people are strenuously opposed to everything that's going on and are frightened and angry and reacting like punch-drunk fighters. They're just too alone, both in their personal lives and associations and also intellectually, without anything to grasp. They don't know how to respond except in irrational ways. In some ways it has sort of the tone of a devastated peasant society after a plague swept it or an army went through and ruined everything. People have just dissolved into inability to respond." How can individuals help to change this, and is the internet a useful tool for that? Does the internet just stagnate individuals further? Thanks."

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