If true, it seems unlikely that marches and protests in recent days would be reaching record numbers. As it stands, the largest ever American march was the Women's March earlier this year. Other notable marches include the March for Science, the March for Women's Lives, the Armenian March for Justice, etc.
Sure, the internet allows armchair protestors the luxury of 'protesting' from home, but it's also a great tool for raising awareness, organizing, and it could be argued that even some amount of armchair protesting is beneficial, as it at least makes the cause visible to those who might not have seen it otherwise.
Let's face it, it would have been very hard to get the ~4 million protestors to march in DC without the internet.
"According to some experts, the initial excitement over the role of social media in political processes in the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East has diminished. As Ekaterina Stepanova argues in her study concerning the role of information and communications technologies in the Arab Spring, social networks largely contributed to political and social mobilization but didn’t play a decisive and independent role in it. Instead, social media acted as a catalyst for revolution, as in the case of Egypt, where the existing gap between the ruling elite and the rest of the population would eventually have resulted in some kind of uprising."
That said, Malcolm Gladwell agrees with you -- that the low-risk protesting that social media provides is also basically without reward [1]
How many more successful, country wide, democratic movements would there have been in the history of humanity if there had been a means of communication and coordination as effective as the internet?
"Need" is distinct from "makes far, far easier and likely". It can be done without the internet, obviously, but the circumstances in which it can be done are undoubtedly far more rare.
For coordinating, I’ll grant the internet +10. For effectively and meaningfully communicating, it gets -100. The state of public discourse is abysmal, and the modes of internet communication do not substantially improve this. Sure, you can use the internet to get a group of tiki torch-wielding people into the same area pretty easily. But there’s no substance or depth of consideration in the public sphere. Everyone immediately opts for vitriol, vilification, and rage-stoking simplistic phrasing to make everything black and white. It’s far more satisfying to the masses, it seems, to absolve themselves of the responsibility to recognize and grapple with nuance.
Well, the Arab Spring, at the time, was seen as the emergence of the internet in the world of democratic revolution. Now we know it was a total failure. Not a single country came out better. Perhaps that is just a coincidence, but I think that it is possible that the speed and shallowness of the communication actually played a big role in the failure of the revolutions. Real, stable, democratic social structures cannot form in such a short time.
There are more forces required than the call-to-arms for a revolution to end in a net success for the people initiating it.
I think it's unfair to task 'the internet' with the entire task of establishing a fair government.
The communications channel succeeded. The call-to-arms was heard. The failure wasn't with the use of the internet, it was with everything that went on after dissent began.
People expected 'internet = democracy' and overburdened the whole concept. Free and wide communications is just a stepping stone, one of many, that edges a governing body into fair-practice.
