The concept of "consent" as it's used in Manufacturing Consent does not apply to those movements at all. It means more than "some people agree with x because of information that was presented to them."
The mechanism is exactly the same. If the media didn’t carry the message and others wouldn’t grab in to that, it wouldn’t happen.
Why aren’t social causes not as prevalent in China? Because the media is controlled. Lots of feminists in CN lament that they are not allowed to influence people. And it’s true. The gov will not allow subversion of their power no matter how just a cause is. It will only happen on their terms.
However, I completely disagree with your statements that:
>The mechanism is exactly the same.
>People don’t just wake up and change their minds. These opinions are filtered down to them.
People do in fact change their minds, for various reasons. These mechanisms are not the same because of power. Large institutions in the media that have lots of reach and authority act as gatekeepers to what is or isn't discussed. This idea that movements are propelled from sympathizers who are popular or have authority just misses how movements form and grow to begin with.
Yes they start out small, but they aren't cleared by the media or any figure before they grow. Movements grow with pressure through direct action to a point where the media cannot ignore it anymore. It is a challenge for every movement that exists.
Manufacturing consent isn’t by default bad. Manufacturing convent to built pubic transit, manufacturing consent to have people vaccinated, etc., in the face of other interests is still manufacturing consent.
The mechanism is different though. We didn't just wake up one day and start hearing multiple coherent media voices that vegetarianism is the way forward. We did have precisely that for the Iraq war.
Iraq war-like talk basically is the poorman’s version of ideal propaganda.
"Propaganda" isn't just an attempt to convince somebody of something. Writing a book advancing a viewpoint isn't automatically propaganda.
And because they fundamentally change societies, they rarely have advocates who are "popular" or have "gravitas". If a social movement is a real social movement, then it does more than change what coats people wear to school. (Changing what clothes people wear happens every year. In fact, they made a whole industry out of it changing every year. The fashion industry.)
No, a social movement has the potential to threaten changes to everything, right down to the actual people in power at the top of a society.
If the people in the society generally accept the social movement as collectively beneficial, then the social movement becomes mainstream societal belief, and over time, will integrate into what we would call that society's "culture". If the people in the society generally reject the social movement, that's when you usually have a war.
For instance, republicanism was a social movement in France, but it's proponents could not get enough people to accept it as a good idea. The proponents refused to give up on the idea and it eventually resulted in war and the Reign of Terror. (Which, ironically, eliminated all of the ideas proponents.) France is now on its Fifth Republic at last count. (Not surprisingly, the Fifth Republic is one that had the support of the populace.) Similarly, the communist movement in Czarist Russia. Not enough accepted it. War ensued, which enabled the proponents to force communism on the people. Then the people got rid of it in the 1990s.
There are also movements that are accepted by the populace. Gandhi's radical idea of universal suffrage in India was readily accepted by legions of people on the Sub-Continent, and eventually, the British simply had to leave.
In all of these cases, those in power were staunchly opposed to the social movements in question. Obviously because those movements threatened not only their power, but to change, effectively, everything in society that even enabled their power.
Veganism, Vegetarianism, anti-fur, etc, those kinds of things just don't rise to the level of movements in my mind because they don't threaten to fundamentally change society in that fashion. There is no threat that the people making decisions if we eat veggies, would be different than the people making decisions if we eat meat. The societal structure remains in place in either case.
Mass media is about the industrialised manifestation of these entities, in an effort to create 'godhead', or "everyone knows _ about _" conditions.
"Everyone knows that the _'s did it", is pretty much the epitome of such a substance.
Mass, collective 'reality' is basically a function of the things we can get as many people to agree to, as possible.
Alas, our individual instincts are not always aligned with the truth, nor the righteous, nor the just. Often-times our individual personalities, as functional components, mixed in certain ways into egregor, become vile creatures, nearly unstoppable power. This is why we do it.
There is no such thing as "America". This is a device invented, manifested, and maintained by an entity so large it seems undefeatable to an individual.
These powers are manufacturable. We can fabricate collective reality. What we can't do too well, is allow our collective minds to become too self-aware. This seems to collapse it in on itself.
Thus, a measure of ones prowess might be, how many lies can you get others to believe, and then: how many can you get them to repeat, in order that it eventually becomes a 'truth'?
Those are not "social causes" and they do exist within the same system. Some corporation hires PR firm to redirect consumption away from expensive fur things, because it sells non-fur things and wants to get in on some of those spending money or another corporation that sells processed vegetable-based foods wants you to buy it, instead of meat and so on. There are lots of forces at play that create and support those movements, it's pretty hard to find truly honest social movements and even if some start that way they will be mostly supported by those who share the same enemies. The government itself wants to divide and marginalize people to make it easier to control them.
As someone who leans left I notice this strongly with all those "left wing" causes. They will choose a variation of that to carry that is least likely to be informing and most likely to exaggerate conflict. For example, they will put the anger and tears of Greta Thunberg and voices like hers front and center again and again, while ignoring the literally thousands of climate experts who could come and explain the facts in a sober and non-polarizing way. This is no accident, it is by design, because it gets more viewers.
The end result of this is that media makes it easy to misinform and lie, hard to inform and tell the truth. This makes it easy for "the powers that be" to push a false narrative to get what they want. All they have to do is set up a conflict and the media laps it up.
However, if everyone is talking about Haskell and you come in and try to shift the conversation to "programming languages that use functions" you are likely not adding anything of interest to the conversation.
Similarly, "Manufacturing Consent" posited a set of specific filters and measured column inches as evidence for the existence of that set of filters. While you are certainly correct that all forms of human social interaction involve filtering information in order for people to have ideas and follow causes in the first place, it's a broad truism that sheds little light on the topic the book discusses.
His attack is what causes we’re driven to consent to.
Elsewhere Chomsky has quipped along the lines of “oh no how horrible if we had world peace” via organic filtering among neighbors.
He’s not challenging that such a process exists. But how the organic process is bent toward disposable consumerism, imperialist conquering, not much different than in the old days of Napoleon and Alexander the Great, even though we call ourselves “civilized”.
And we consent via manufactured apathy. Every option the public may want is explicitly bad, m4a, reducing military spending, higher taxes. Every option the elites want is just the right balance, citizens united, lower taxes, binding arbitration, etc etc