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Sorry, this isn’t very fully fleshed out, and hence probably not worthy of the Switchboard. Something Haus said about there likely only being around one hundred of us posting made me think: we really aren’t that influential. And even if there were 5000 of us, we still wouldn’t be influential, even in the rare to improbable instance that we would all choose to exert our influence in the same direction. And when I thought about Barbelith as a place which is individually so influential, it was strange to think about it as being so powerless in real terms. I guess what I’m thinking about with influence is political influence, and I’m thinking in terms of employing the internet as a way of forming interest groups that could lobby governments on national and international issues. Not comics. Though that said, there’s no reason why we couldn’t collectively decide to stick it to the big two with regard to their scheduling, except that I don’t think they’d notice.
Everyone playing politics is pretty much aware now of the power the internet has as a tool for spreading gossip, disseminating information, sharing knowledge, increasing the level of debate, and Barbelith (hopefully) participates in that. But in terms of being listened to, I don’t think of us as “influential”, and I can’t think of any other group or community that’s likely to even be acknowledged. Things like ORG obviously exist as special interest groups, and I hope they’re listened to, and there are various forms of online activism tied to specific causes, but I don’t know about any more general groups being considered as part of the demographic. No-one consults TMO before releasing government policy, but with enough numbers, and opinions marshalled together (easier said than done), there’s no reason that I can think of that they couldn’t be considered as another community “voting bloc” that needed to have its concerns addressed.
So… I wanted, as someone uneducated in such things, to ask: do these hypothetical politically influential collectives exist? And if they don’t – should that be the case? Would we simply need larger online groups? Do you think the situation is going to change in the future, or is this all a bit half-baked? |
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