In political campaigns it has been proved that nothing improves a candidate’s chance of winning votes more than personal appearances. Face-to-face interaction matters. Most people do not pay attention to political advertisements; they are more likely to be swayed by the candidate turning up in front of them and talking to them directly; or having the candidate’s supporters come to their door to discuss the issues with them.
This is true of any type of campaigning; nothing can replace face-to-face dialog.
If you want to raise awareness about an issue, you simply must talk to people, and you need to talk to them directly; one-on-one at their doors, in small meetings at someone’s home, or in assembly halls. Not through tweets, not through Facebook. Real grassroots organizing, canvassing of neighborhoods, actual human interaction. Social media is useful, but it is by no means enough.
In places like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and elsewhere, we need to do this. We need to explain to people what is going on. Contextualize the domestic situation within the global system, historical patterns, and an explanation of the mechanisms of real existing power. We need to explain the dynamics behind the misery. What are Austerity measures, why are they imposed, and who benefits from them, and more importantly, what ultimate outcomes do they cause?
You can do this, again, in one-on-one discussions; you can arrange informal meetings in your home, or, if circumstances permit, you can initiate petitions against, say, cuts to subsidies, or against unregulated Public-Private Partnerships, and so on; with the petitions being merely a vehicle through which you create opportunities to raise awareness.
The social media culture is deceptive. There appears to be interaction, yet in reality, each person continues to exist in isolation. Subjects of the utmost urgency are mixed on a person’s Facebook timeline with frivolous matters, undermining one’s ability to weigh their relative importance; and the message is lost in the overall blur of random information.
If you want to organize people, you have to be among them, you have to talk to them, it simply cannot be done remotely.