Friday, January 28, 2011
Flashmob!
The internet may or may not have invented flashmobbing, if not it certainly enabled it to happen on a larger scale and turned it into an art form of some kind. As ever though, art transmutes into politics and thus these Candadian mothers have used the technique to make a very valid political point.
It seems that Canada is up in arms about breast-feeding and whether it's really okay to do it in public. So a hundred mothers in Montreal staged a "nurse-in" protest at a downtown shopping complex last week, breast-feeding simultaneously before a curious crowd of reporters, mall security guards and passers-by.
They say that the event was retribution for a store that had thrown out a mother for breast-feeding earlier this month. The mother in question was so fed up that she created a blog, breastfortheweary.com. The rest, as they say, is history:
With just the one post, the blog quickly started gathering hits -- almost 7,000 so far. A day later, a Facebook group had been created to organize the nurse-in for Jan. 19. Newspapers and blogs across Canada and the United States soon picked up the story, creating a national debate over whether Smith or the employee had been right.
A national debate, an apology from the store in question and another small victory for the power of the internet.
It seems that Canada is up in arms about breast-feeding and whether it's really okay to do it in public. So a hundred mothers in Montreal staged a "nurse-in" protest at a downtown shopping complex last week, breast-feeding simultaneously before a curious crowd of reporters, mall security guards and passers-by.
They say that the event was retribution for a store that had thrown out a mother for breast-feeding earlier this month. The mother in question was so fed up that she created a blog, breastfortheweary.com. The rest, as they say, is history:
With just the one post, the blog quickly started gathering hits -- almost 7,000 so far. A day later, a Facebook group had been created to organize the nurse-in for Jan. 19. Newspapers and blogs across Canada and the United States soon picked up the story, creating a national debate over whether Smith or the employee had been right.
A national debate, an apology from the store in question and another small victory for the power of the internet.
