I for one have written a number of factual articles about Gary McKinnon for precisely the reasons you suggest. And I happen to know I am not alone in that either. On Twitter, if you look, large numbers of #garymckinnon tweets are about the facts of the matter, not to mention the painstaking efforts to convince people of why the extradition is unjust. Tweeter by tweeter.

I also happen to know that the Home Office and Buckingham Palace have both been overwhelmed with the volume of letters and phonecalls. Twitter is only the most readily visible aspect of a campaign which has so far been successful in keeping McKinnon in the UK, and has gathered cross-party support in Parliament, a single recorded by Bob Geldof, Chrissie Hynde, David Gilmour and others, a barrage of individual complaints to MPs, the Home Secretary and the Queen, and other things in the pipeline which I am not at liberty to publicise just yet.

As for the recent protest outside the Home Office (attended by no less than 8 MPs, including Nick Clegg and Keith Vaz), many of those attending were in fact recruited via Twitter. Including people who travelled to London from the West Country and from East Anglia especially for the occasion. To say that Twitter doesn’t translate into action is therefore false. How do you think *I* got involved with it? Seriously. I for one am living proof that Twitter “works”.

And you have to bear in mind of course, that the Gary McKinnon campaign has no budget, no employees, and consists of public-spirited well-wishers who have their own lives to conduct. Not bad for a bunch of hobbyists, I would say.

In any case, raising awareness is a vital first step. And I don’t think it’s very nice to knock it. Your mother would do the same as Janis Sharp, I am sure, especially if she weren’t a professional campaigner. Which the vast majority of Gary McKinnon’s supporters are not.

DE also is right. Human decision-making is “fast and frugal”.

What IS interesting is how people generally are more ready to vote for a christmas single or a Big Brother contestant than they are to act on matters of any actual significance. It’s not as cool or new-fangled, maybe, as purporting to debunk a web 2.0 “myth”, but it is *people* that do this stuff. Or don’t do it. Just as they have since time immemorial.

It is as if that the idea that the internet gives power back to the people has become so strong that we look for the most inane things to justify our belief of this myth.

While other countries still have a healthy form of public protest, the system in the UK is so closed that we now look for any easy targets to justify that it still exists here!

We now use the internet to get a chocolate bar released, to effect the sales of songs etc, etc.Twitter, Facebook and all the rest of the social media tools we play with are a fantastic waste of time. Just like drugs keep the disaffected youth from rioting, the internet has been used to stop the lazy thinking person from actually doing something to interrupt the political class’s appetite for power.

Of course, I can’t change anything, once I’ve posted this comment, I will read a few blogs, post a rant on twitter and carry on with my life, smug in the feeling that I have done something!

Mass demonstrations are ignored in democracies

Demos are largely seen as something reactionaries with time on their hands get up to. In fact, MPs feel compelled to ignore demonstrations.

One tweet has a longer lifetime than most demonstrations. If there is one thing Twitter/Facebook does brilliantly it’s to co-ordinate effort. That was certainly made crystal clear by the RATM campaign. Power can be re-routed through organisation.

The climate change argument simply hasn’t been settled. “Awareness” to “consensus” to “action” sounds like some form of Communist workflow; I could reply with twaddle from the Matrix “you have already decided, now you must understand your choice”. Most people formed opinions on climate change with a speed and determination that far outstripped their understanding.

It looks very much that Twitter has changed Iran. It hasn’t altered the voting system, but it has hopefully helped Iranians focus on what they actually want from their leaders. So in very different cases, Twitter does “work”.