Citation needed. For riots, it's obviously wrong: football hooligans have been doing it for ages, and they have no underlying cause but "let's fuck shit up".
For demonstrations: it's mostly a social thing. If your friends go, you go, because otherwise you're signalling to your friends that you are not like them, and you don't want to do that, because being isolated hurts.
Only if you aren't invested in the cause. Not everyone takes a nihilistic nothing-matters approach to this sort of thing.
Most of them don't want that more than they want to stay dry though, so bad weather usually translates into smaller events.
What if someone is there for more than one reason(Hint everyone)? Do they not count anymore?
Bad weather lowers attendance for all events you dullard that doesn't support anything you've said. You're just ascribing intention to thousands of people and it's really lazy thiking. You haven't even scratched the surface of why some people are there but go ahead and keep making your wild assumptions
Tell that to the guys who didn't believe in the cause but joined the jihad and died in Iraq/Syria because all their buddies were doing it. There's a huge element of peer pressure involved in getting off the porch. That's why this article about distortion of apparent norms is relevant to the topic of protests (and other implementations of "getting off the porch"). Having the belief that people your respect and identify with are also doing something is a massive motivator that makes the difference to a lot of people.
> If people don't have half a second of patience, how much does it take to motivate them to go to a protest, shout, march, and sometimes even risk their lives?
People are bored right now.
Definitely, but the algorithms for social media do not help the worst cases of the most suffering become more viral than more infrequent cases of lesser suffering.
The issue is that all that matters is virality. Sometimes suffering is viral when it should be, but other times it is not, and when it is not, no one will care, because the algorithms of virality control what everyone will see and care about.
We're seeing this right now with covid as it becomes less viral and fashionable to report on, and we've seen it previously with things like the mass factory farming of billions of animals, which doesn't seem to get a ton of attention nowadays, among many other terrible things, even though the magnitude of suffering involved is so great.
Before Facebook came out, how much did news reporters, even on MSNBC, lead the conversation against systematic social and economic injustice towards African Americans? They failed miserably on that front. Now we don't have to rely on the media for that. The oppressed people themselves are leading the narrative, not because it's fashionable, but because they can't breathe.
>The oppressed people themselves are leading the narrative, not because it's fashionable
I'm simply suggesting that the narrative is led by what content is viral. Depending on what people like to talk about, sometimes that might be a just cause and appear to have good effects. But, there is not at all guaranteed, and the system doesn't really care if your cause is just or not, only if it is viral and profitable to report on, which generally means enraging.
'Social Media' is not 'more democratic' it's just a free-for-all where small voices have massively disproportionate power, and there are no controls or integrity - it's just crude, unbridled, bloody populism. A more democratic 'social media' would weigh every plebe's opinion equally.
The 'Free Press' is a self-regulating institution, like a 5th estate, much like the Central Bank, you don't get a 'vote' to determine what interest rates will be, but there is an open system in place for that to happen. You can 'vote' by buying papers and whatnot, but there are other systematic controls.
Social Media is not something we have figured out how to properly use just yet.
The Tyranny of the Majority Wikipedia page presents a criticism of majority rule. This criticism does not contradict the idea that democracy is likely to result in majority rule; it supports it. One can say "democracy bascially means majority rule" because, for those of us in the West, that is, by and large, what we get. According to Wikipedia, the legistlatures of all democratic nations use majority rule (the process) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_rule
However, I only presented a personal and basic definition of democracy, not necessarily a comprehensive or correct one. That is why I used the words "To me" and "basically".
When majority rule is not the outcome of democracy, would you agree that "the people", at least some of them, will contest the notion that what they have is a "democracy"?
How can anyone see the popular social newtorks as democractic?
How did you come to this conclusion? Legitimately asking because I'd draw the opposite conclusion.
When people are forced out of their social and economic agency by a narrow elite, they will continue to be deprived of their agency long after that elite is replaced by another elite and another elite until people forget that they ever had culture and wealth. Now, I don’t think we’re seeing the worst manifestation of that in the U.S. Far from it. But it was striking to see not only how consistently problematic elite stratification is, but how good it can be to give power to the people.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307719227/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_pp...
If people don't have half a second of patience, how much does it take to motivate them to go to a protest, shout, march, and sometimes even risk their lives? Sure, if we're not careful, if we don't implement the right controls, social media can be used for ill. However, I'd be very careful not to generalize from results like in the OP.
There are groups of people that you wouldn't even pay attention to if it weren't for social media. There is suffering that would be invisible to the world if it weren't for social media. It is our duty to expend the small amount of energy required before assuming the worst about a freedom struggle, because sometimes solidarity is the only thing that powerless people can have.