On 2/10/2011 5:47 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
> There's also an implicit class bias in the outsized coverage devoted to the role played by the electronic media. College educated, English-speaking, tech savvy commentators in the West readily identify with, and have the greatest access to, their professional counterparts in the demonstrations. So there's a tendency to exaggerate the leading role of the students and intelligensia in the uprising, and their mastery of these powerful new means of communication. The greater mass of workers and shopkeepers, who are less accessible and for whom the the Western media have less sympathy, are relegated to the background
It's funny, though. In France, strikes and demonstrations shut down the whole country a few months ago over the pensions issue. It was the biggest such event since 1995. Yet in all the coverage of the protests, I don't remember US journalists breathlessly reporting on how they were all (in a mechanical sense) coordinated through the internet and SMS - which they were, in the same sense that the 1995 protests were probably coordinated through phones and fax machines.
Social media is about The Future, which in the journalist's consciousness means (a) young consumers and (b) democracy spreading to the Third World. It certainly doesn't mean strikes.
SA