Future of protests is in the hybrid

Another type of protest. Protest as meet-and-greet. Face to face leads becomes website to website, inbox to inbox, and then back into the streets. What happens when it gets back into the streets. It's lazerfeld gone crazy.

This is also a sign of the decentralization of media. Organizers no longer need the attention of centralized media to spread their message. The growth of the diversified network (new kind of mass media?) carries digital word-of-mouth extending it beyond geographical boundaries.

What about cultural boundaries? The benefit of unified media content was that cultural likeness was more pervasive and allowed easy communication between fellows using the same sample sets of reference points. Now, the media channels are decentralized, but the culture is more fractured which, ultimately, makes communication more difficult. Many people may agree that government is the problem, but half of them think it is a problem inherent in the institution, the other half just want to find better people to run it. They may be unified in their disgust, but they are also separated by their predispositions toward solutions.

"One irony for Obama is that the Tea Party movement is using his own organizing techniques against him: Meetup.com announcements, Twitter tweets, viral videos, e-mail trees and all the other innovations falling under the politically potent umbrella known as social networking. Indeed, in the online age, the whole purpose of physical gatherings has changed. Real crowds draw virtual crowds, and vice versa, as David DeGerolamo, a Tea Party organizer from North Carolina, explained during a seminar in Nashville. Recounting how he built a statewide operation from scattered local groups, DeGerolamo said he started with a rally. "I went around and contacted as many of these groups as I could find and invited them to Asheville for what we called the first N.C. Freedom Convention." That was last May. When everyone was gathered, DeGerolamo coaxed the groups — notoriously prickly about their independence — to join under the banner of a single website, NCFreedom.us. Next, he convened a town-hall meeting "for one reason — to get YouTube videos," DeGerolamo said. "YouTube is one of our best allies in terms of becoming a communications network." Today, DeGerolamo's group sends out more than 6,000 e-mails a week, stages informal protest parades called Rolling Tea Parties and posts dozens of videos of the movement in action."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1964903,00.html?xid=huffpo-direct#ixzz0fuRlFgdW