Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Steiner
In a world in which attention is an increasingly precious commodity, people go too far because it works.
Peaceful protestors marching in a polite and orderly fashion with all the right permits rarely get the news coverage that a couple of jerks who break windows and throw water bottles at the police do.
Likewise, mutually respectful exchanges of opinions on knitting (or poetry) sites rarely go viral.
If you were to measure success in terms of how many people are paying attention to your very worthy message, then holding a public auto-da-fé that will cause thousands of bystanders to fear your wrath is a more successful strategy than attempting one-by-one conversions of misguided or oblivious individuals, about whose feelings and mental health you actually care.
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True enough, if you measure success by attention alone, negative attention is easier gained than positive. On the other hand, if you measure it by actual persuasion of the individuals to be persuaded, the misguided and oblivious, then I reckon you will have better chances of success through one-by-one conversions. Similarly, though a couple of jerks who break windows and throw water bottles at police may indeed get more attention overall than a hundred peaceful protesters with permits, the danger is that the kind of attention gained by that violence may be counterproductive to the cause of their protest. I should know—this scenario plays out time and again in Portland. Seeing as attention can also be counterproductive, I think it should not be considered as the sole index of success.
For an extremer example, take a radical fringe in the world of animal rights activism, who, having grown unsatisfied by the level of publicity achieved by passive means, resorted instead to acts of violence to protest. In June 1990, they exploded a bomb in the car of one veterinary surgeon at a research defense establishment, and then another in that of a professor of physiology at Bristol University. Baskerville, the first-mentioned victim, escaped with her life but only after jumping through the window of her jeep as the bomb turned fireball next to her fuel tank. These acts of theirs secured headlines, more attention than ever. So were they successful by them? If attention were the sole measure of success, then they were remarkably so. But that definition would make all terrorists who claim legitimate causes of grievance successful. Nay, I think that where a cause is at stake, the measure of success should count the kind of attention that helps but discount the attention, however great, that hinders the cause.
In this case, my concern would be that a movement otherwise legitimate might by overzealousness give themselves a bad rap and arm those who would discredit them with easy ammunition. Methinks.