How Viral Sharing Powered the Women’s March

As millions of women, men and children in cities across the world streamed home after the Women’s March against Donald Trump on January 21, they felt what most people would feel after being part of such a monumental event: tired, exhilarated, somehow blessed. They knew they had been a part of something staggering, a bringing together of people in  massive record-breaking crowds. It was, they felt, one of humanity’s finest hours.

For days, the news showed happy throngs, many of them young, meeting, losing each other, reconnecting by iphone, expressing their joy and wonder that their concerns were shared. Jubilant in the message that bound them, not even aware of how it came about, and taking for granted that this sort of thing can happen in the era of social media.

How it all began

The story of its origin is old hat by now: On election night, Teresa Shook, a retired attorney and grandmother living in Hawaii, was so upset and frustrated by Donald Trump’s win, that she decided to do something about it.
“I went to bed the night of the election just discouraged and woke up feeling worse the next day thinking, ‘How could this be?’ I was just sad and dumbfounded,” Shook told a local TV station .

The next night, with some help from friends online, she created a Facebook event page calling for a march on Washington after Trump’s inauguration, and sharing it on Pantsuit Nation, a popular Facebook group. Before she went to bed, she had about 40 responses. When she woke up the next morning, she had more than 10,000.

Within days, the list of committed attendees swelled and grew. Theresa knew this was something larger than herself, larger than her anger, and even larger than the message itself. It was an outpouring of sheer energy, charging like a runaway train, and it couldn’t be stopped.

On the day of the March, as Teresa’s initial actions manifested in the streets and cities around the world, she and her small group of organizers may have basked in the reflection of their own success for a few moments, but this was lost as images of waves of people erupted across the media—this was different from the glory that is usually showered on one individual in crowds of similar size and import, like a rock concert, or a Pope’s visit, or a celebrity’s appearance—this belonged to the participants, and everyone was on the same level.

Devon Maloney, a young freelance journalist living in Los Angeles describes it in a hard-hitting  article for “Good”,

“What began as a slapdash Facebook event created in the days following the 2016 presidential election by a handful of white women with no grassroots organizing experience resulted Saturday in a staggering, record-breaking global demonstration of solidarity and resistance. Nearly 5 million people  are estimated to have gathered in the streets around the world to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump…Saturday was a landmark day for civil disobedience, one that will be remembered for years to come.”

As news spread across the internet and television, it was billed as a a massive outpouring of Women’s opposition to the new president, one who threatened their health and their rights. For many, it was their first exposure to civil disobedience

What made this different

Older women, and they were a lot of them, no doubt recalled the protests of their youth, and thought—here we go again! For them, the message was the same as all those years ago, some of the signs could be taken right out of 1964—But one glance around them, at young faces looking down at their smartphones, deciphering their cryptic messages, and there it was—suddenly it was not the same.

Hardly a phone call was made, not one meeting was held, not one bulletin sent out in the mail—something else was taking hold.
The message was old: Fight, fight, fight for your rights.
But the medium was new, and had effortlessly bound them together.

I’ll leave it to a young person, Issie Lapowski, to explain: Here is part of her beautiful and inspiring message in “Wired”,

“It was, in other words, an event as sprawling, diverse, and ubiquitous as the platform that spawned it: Facebook.
It’s the world’s town square, a venue far-reaching enough to connect people of all races, religions, and nationalities and targeted enough to elevate the petty squabbles of the local PTA meeting. All of it was there at the Women’s March and at marches around the world: a massive outpouring of highly distributed opposition to the new most powerful person in the world, all under an umbrella that felt wide enough to shelter the divergent passions of millions.”

As the rest of us watched this event unfold on our smart phones, our laptops, and on television, we knew that this was how things were going to be from now on in this fast, full throttle age of social media and artificial intelligence, where a single person is able to make a suggestion on Facebook or Twitter, or YouTube, and have it result in a massive, even global event — and potentially a new political movement.