Media-created reputations attract members who join a fictional version of a movement
Evidence
And secondly—paradoxically—the popularity bestowed on the group created an even bigger issue. SDS was flooded with new members, allowing it to grow at a rate of 300 percent in a single year. But these new arrivals did not want to join SDS—they wanted to join the organization they had read about in the newspaper, which didn’t actually exist. They showed up with longer hair, less ideological commitments, and a strange set of assumptions about the organization. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 74
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Media coverage can create organizations that outstrip their actual membership — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 73; Hierarchical organization correlates with protest movement success — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 847; Online influencers become symbolic placeholders for audiences’ larger moral and political allegiances (+8 more)
Broader Connections
- Online influencers become symbolic placeholders for audiences’ larger moral and political allegiances
#corroborates(0.85) - Media assumptions about a movement shape what they subsequently find.
#expands(0.80) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 274 - Fan communities fused devotion with identity politics, recruiting queer zealotry
#exemplifies(0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 533 - Real people sometimes adopt fictional symbols inspired by themselves.
#responds-to(0.80) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 346 - Conspiracy movements depend on a symbiosis of believers and opportunists
#complicates(0.75) — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 905 - Public perception of deviance is driven by media narratives.
#corroborates(0.75) — Cohen, Stanley, Folk devils and moral panics, 219 - Media portrayals amplify activist passion while muffling their reasoning
#complicates(0.72) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1418