Web blackouts. Is this the new face of American activism?

A couple of times, OA makes the point that the blackouts are meaningless to people who are not "digital natives". This is wrong. Driving to work this morning, the Wikipedia blackout was mentioned on the BBC Radio 4 news - just one line, but it was there. During the day, I listened to 6 Music where Radcliffe and Maconie were doing a light-hearted "we'll answer your questions for you because Wikipedia is down today". Driving home, the Media Show (Radio 4 again) had an in-depth discussion of digital "piracy", the blackouts, etc. Finally, when I got home, my daughter asked why so many sites were down and I gave her a summary of the whole thing. This has brought massive publicity for this issue, in a country (England) which might be assumed (on the face of it) to be unaffected by SOPA/PIPA.<p>I hope this <i>is</i> the new face of American activism, or any kind of activism for that matter. No rubber bullets have been fired, nobody has been arrested, no water cannon were discharged, real-life traffic has not been brought to a standstill. But the point is finding its mark in a way which might have been impossible just a few years ago.

It seems to be a common idea that "the web" is opening the door of companies encouraging people to take positions, but this is simply not true. The MPAA and RIAA have been propagandizing people directly for decades, and have even made inroads into school curricula. What has changed is that "the web" is no longer pretending they can just float by, unsullied. It's not even as if "the web" particularly has a bigger pulpit than "the movie and music industry". It's just never been systematically used like this.<p>There is nothing happening today that SOPA advocates haven't been doing for decades.