I do realise that for mass protests to be successful, they have to require little effort. I’ve only recently graduated from university where I was very active in the politics of the students’ union and trying to get the students to care was nigh on impossible because quite frankly most of them were too lazy. The blackout doesn’t require much effort – simply change your picture. The only effort required is in making the best of the disruption caused (such as identifying avatars rather than names) However, I firmly believe that for protests to be effective they do have to be somewhat disruptive. It’s disruption that awakens us from our happy slumber and forces us to think about serious issues in the world. Many people don’t like it, but without disrupting their cosy little existence it can be extremely hard to make them sit up and pay attention.

Since being home though, I’ve had a look at the whys and wherefores so have more of a grasp on what this is about. And I agree with the principle of the protest, that it is wrong – is ludicrous too strong a word? – to remove the internet from people without even investigation or proof of any wrongdoing (to precis quite considerably and ignoring the fundamental ‘if they infringe copyright, should someone really be banned from the entire interwebs’ thing).

Still, these things occur to me:

First up – I don’t want to be a sheep (!). I don’t want to do something because lots of people I follow have done it (and obviously feel strongly about it) without first fully understanding what it’s all about myself or I’d feel like a right bandwagon-jumper. Still, that’s a bit lame isn’t it?

So, digging a bit deeper …

I honestly wonder what good it’ll do? That sounds more confrontational than I mean it too – my point is that when I agree with something, I’m more likely to put my name to a petition or similar; something where there’s a more a permanent and measurable record of mine and other people’s opinion, all in one place; quantifiable ‘strength in numbers’ type things. How can the numbers of black avatars be measured? Isn’t it a bit transient? (Does this even matter though?! Arrgghh, I don’t know!)

I’m in no way knocking the gesture – I just can’t get it into my head that it’s terribly effective. Still, these are just my admittedly ill-thought out, fairly weary-headed intial thoughts – and as you can see from the end of the previous paragraph, I’m hugely indecisive so – feel free to convince me that I can make a difference!

As I mentioned on Twitter, I felt that as long as the protest was affecting usability of Twitter, it was self defeating: the only people we are inconveniencing through this action is ourselves.

Avatar’s are a key way of me reading and making sense of Twitter, particularly when I’m having several conversations at once.  Essentially it made most of my Twitter stream look like the same person was speaking all the time, with little pay off in terms of outcomes from the protest: it was like everyone going to a pub and wearing blindfolds to protest about something that some Methodists were doing.

What’s being asked here is something different. we’re effectively going on Twitter with bags over our heads and while, yes, you can use Twitter by reading the names I think many of us use the icons as a way to visually filter the stream. I know I look out for icons of good friends or those who often give high value tweetage. Suddenly that’s gone.

It’s not a big thing but it’s still a thing which raises the barrier to entry. You need to make a commitment to join in. A commitment is not a bad thing, and there should be ways for people to make the effort (be it writing to press / politicians / tourist boards, etc) but there also needs to be a zero-effort, zero-disruption way to protest to surround that.

So, in conclusion, I think the full blackout icon thing was a bit much. (I also had big issues with the UK text message campaign and that darned pseudo-Manga thing that made everybody look the same). Better would be a tool which took people’s existing icons and overlayed them with “s92a” or something. That would give a uniformity to the protest while letting us get on with Twitter as usual.