Translated material
Social protest ripens on social networks
It seems that in Veliky Novgorod, a wave of social protest is slowly ripening. Against the backdrop of the beggarly salaries, the price chaos of public utilities has long been shaken by the core of popular patience. Blogger Dmitry Krasitsky DVDM , tired of wiring communal workers, created the VKontakte group, in which he proposed uniting Novgorodians and residents of the region, dissatisfied with the growth of tariffs.
Group http://vk.com/club50349055 "Vecher in the Novgorod Region", created on February 28, already has more than 100 participants. By the standards of our city - a lot. It is possible to predict the growth of its number in a direct proportion with an increase in housing and communal services tariffs.
Thus, the region can again witness how the network protest becomes quite real. In our region, this happened twice already: during the defense of student Sergei Simanov, beaten by drunk police, as well as during protests in December 2011.
The protest initiative resulted in the streets of the city, formed inside social networks.
The structure of protest in December 2011 is especially interesting: the group created on the VKontakte social network was able to accumulate protest moods, but could not nominate a single leader in the process.
The situation turned out to be paradoxical: the frankly frightened colonels of the Ministry of Internal Affairs tried to find out who the leader was - but there was no single leader, there were no one or more specific people with whom one could speak with representatives of several hundred of the gathered demonstrators.
Now the situation is repeated: the protest that has a social color ripens on social networks. The only question is when this protest flows from the Internet to the streets of the city and will the process have a single leader?
In the photo: protest against dishonest elections, Veliky Novgorod, December 2011.