How mass media missed the march that social media turned into a phenomenon.
By Paul Farhi January 21 at 7:31 PM
From its inception, it was a social-media phenomenon, not a mainstream-media one.
The organizers of the many women’s marches that filled the streets of cities across the world on Saturday got the word out about their projects primarily via Facebook. From there, news spread from one feed to another, and from one mouth to another, feeding a vast river of humanity.
By contrast, mainstream news outlets — focused primarily on the inauguration of a president, against whom many of the marchers were protesting — gave the run-up to the event relatively scant coverage.
Taken collectively, the Women’s March on Washington and its many affiliated “sister” marches were perhaps the largest single demonstration of the power of social media to create a mobilization.
The march has precedent in the annals of online activism: The Arab Spring demonstrations of 2011 and the tea party, Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, were all driven by social media. But perhaps no such effort has turned out so many in a single day. The crush of bodies was so heavy that organizers and public safety officials in several cities, including Chicago, suspended plans for actually marching anywhere. That turned some of the gatherings into rallies.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-mass-media-missed-the-march-that-social-media-turned-into-a-phenomenon/2017/01/21/2db4742c-e005-11e6-918c-99ede3c8cafa_story.html?utm_term=.3bd88868fa26&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
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