Children's Crusade: A Primer on How Britain's Students Are Organising Using Social Media | techPresident

Students in the United Kingdom are on the march against deep cuts in higher education spending, and their protests are being organized and amplified by what, more and more, seems to be the standard social media tool-kit of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Google Maps (showing where marches are planned). Tomorrow they're holding the second in what appears to be a series of planned national walk-outs, and people are starting to call it a "Children's Crusade" for the large number of middle-school and high-school age students who are participating, along with their college peers. The forecast calls for snow, but it may also be a very big snowball fight, if all the plans circulating online come to fruition.

Here's a bit of a background guide of links to get better acquainted with what's going on:

• The Guardian's via The Observer.
• One high school student who was "kettled" was given the keynote speech at this past Sunday's organizing conference. Listen to his words:
  

  We sure showed something much bigger last Wednesday. This was meant to be the first post-ideological generation, right? This was meant to be the generation that never thought of anything bigger than our Facebook profiles and our TV screens. This was meant to be the generation where the only thing that Saturday night meant was X Factor. I think now that claim is quite ridiculous.

• Angus Johnston's US-focused Student Activism blog is a great resource. Here's a by him asking why Twitter didn't feature the #demo2010 tag while it was clearly trending last week. (People are going to be asking these kinds of questions more and more, as Twitter is woven into the thread of live action and reaction.)
• Here's a savage video parody of the Cameron-Clegg government's response, using the internet's favorite Hitler mash-up:
  

  The key dialogue:

  “Clegg has lied so much his nose is bigger than Pinnochio’s… [The protesters were] supposed to march in line like in the 2003 anti-war demos. They’re not supposed to resist! The liberals were supposed to cover our arses, give us a ‘progressive edge’, make us less nasty. Now what, civil disobedience, occupations, riots… That’s how Martin Luther Kings and the suffragettes made progress. What ever happened to X Factor, X Boxes, and consumerism? People have begun to engage with real political issues. Debate is going beyond a few smashed windows. Society is waking up to the possibility of challenging us… ‘Big society’ is fucked. But gentlemen, if you think I’m going to bow to the will of the people, you’re seriously mistaken."

• For the Clash generation, here's leftie rocker Billy Bragg talking about how he's following the tweets into the streets.
• One more, via my pal Sam Smith: The head of the National Union of Students apologizes for "spineless dithering" over the protests and throws in with them. (I will now use the phrase "spineless dithering" as often as possible.)

With governments across Europe (and soon the United States?) imposing austerity cuts to social spending in the wake of the financial meltdown, these kinds of student protest movements are likely to keep bubbling. It will be interesting to see if they manage to link up with other groups and grow across borders, or if the cold weather and the inevitable ebb and flow of student life leads them to twitter out.

via techpresident.com

Posted via email from Brian's posterous