In Chapter 1, Stewart, Smith, and Denton give us a list of
characteristics that define social movements. Your first task for
this blog post is to summarize what those characteristics are in a
paragraph.
Once you have your first paragraph written, choose a group that
might be considered a social movement and apply each of the
textbook's criteria to this group. Do they match the descriptions put
forth by the authors? In your opinion, can this group be considered a
social movement?
Stewart, Smith, and Denton offer a variety of characteristics for social movements such as its size, marketing strategy, the time they are created, the types of events they develop, and the types of persuasion they use to approach a positive outcome. this chapter offers various examples to describe every characteristic from the social movement organizations; When describing the size of social movements, the authors say that "One person marching for a thousand hours is not the same as a thousand people marching for one hour." This, in my opinion, is a very true statement.When i think back to the various popular protests committed in history that had positive outcomes, almost all of them were done in large groups. For example, when women were protesting for women suffrage, they always united in large groups, whether they were blocking streets or standing in front of the white house, they were never alone. Also, because many social movement organizations may not be supported by the media or politicians, they are forced to market in other media groups such as facebook, blogs, and creating their own websites.
ReplyDeleteA group that came to my mind when reading this chapter was the "Anonymous group" who are well known throughout the internet instead of CNN or The Herald. this group is known by many as a "hacker group" because they can so easily take over large, corporate, and government websites.I believe this group uses coercion as a form of persuasion because of the amounts of times they have hacked websites such as the website of Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, replacing it with a message from Anonymous. The Anonymous have become well known throughout the internet, especially with the millennial group, and i have no doubts that one day they will be recognized nationwide.