a lot of inside-the-Beltway commentators assured their constituencies that the SOPA fight wasn’t really any kind of grassroots effort – it was led by Google, or Wikipedia, or someone.
After the SOPA protest, I heard that tripe all over the Internet from people speaking in ignorance. To this day, people malign online efforts, call all of it “slacktivism” and roundly discount its power despite a solid history of making an impact.
It’s basically just educating one another. To dismiss the power of education is to dismiss the crux of every human advancement made in history. People en masse don’t get informed and motivated to demand change out of thin air.
The Founding Fathers of the United States did the same thing but with a different medium. Obviously, Internet activism needs to be followed up with offline activism, but it’s not going to happen in the first place if people aren’t informed.
That’s said, I do hope we don’t reach a point where people think they don’t need to do things offline to make a difference. There does need to be followup along with the online efforts as well.
