The lights are going out all over Twitter

I'm getting sick of the "vote this up if you want ___" mentality. If you want to change the world, start by understanding it well enough to know that you need to convince people outside new media.

I can appreciate the sentiment behind this, but how in the world is this going to change anyone's mind? Do the decision makers in New Zealand even know what Twitter is?

I think the purpose of these plans are to raise awareness in the mainstream media. This article is a good example of this tactic working. It doesn't matter if the decidion makers know what Twitter is, they know what newspapers are.

In Canada when the government introduced their new copyright laws about 100,000 people joined a facebook group overnight. Alone that group wouldn't achieve much, but all media picked up the "100,000 people Facebook group" and it was headlines for days, causing the government to backdown on the bill.

I do agree that if people want to change the world they should get out and do something to change it directly, but if they aren't willing to do that these small online protests still do affect the real world.

Ideas are waves and the Internet is just a medium.