I suppose anyone with access to a computer is aware of the Stop Online Piracy Act that was introduced to the House in October – especially if you’re someone who uses Wikipedia as obsessively as I do. When I say obsessively, I mean obsessively – I probably look something up five times a day, and at least once of those five times, I’ll end up spending hours link-surfing Wikipedia pages.
Needless to say, Wednesday’s blackout was an effective way to get my attention. Every time I forgot about the blackout and searched for something on Wikipedia, only to find the highly frustrating image as featured in this post, I cursed SOPA and everything it stood for – and then attempted to look it up on Wikipedia.
It was, undeniably, an effective protest. My twitter-feed was abuzz, and Facebook was overloaded with political comments by friends I know would have trouble naming a local newspaper. The protest became an interesting reflection on democracy when Rep. Smith announced that he was postponing action on the bill for the time-being. It was an exciting moment for a lot of people, I imagine, who may feel as jaded as I do about the limited impact that peaceful protest seems to have nowadays.
In a country where “lobbying” is a bad word, it seems to me that Wikipedia’s protest – and the similarly peaceful protest of many other websites – can be seen as democracy by a different definition. While there is no general election to give power to these websites, we do so by electing to use them on a regular basis. Without a constitution, or a charter, many of these websites chose to represent the wishes of their own “constituents”, and acted as delegates for a massive online community of people who would be negatively affected by the implications of SOPA and PIPA. It was a perfect example of E-Democracy, a fun term you can read all about on Wikipedia, for free, because the internet is a great and powerful thing.
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