Showing up for a protest becomes a cognitive fashion statement, not a political act to effect change.

An interesting observation in Why Street Protests Don't Work by Moises Naim. Naim provides an example of what might be behind the issue.

Why? How can so many extremely motivated people achieve so little? One answer might be found in the results of an experiment conducted by Anders Colding-Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen. In 2009, he created a Facebook group to protest the demolition of the historic Stork Fountain in a major square of the Danish capital. Ten thousand people joined in the first week; after two weeks, the group was 27,000 members-strong. That was the extent of the experiment. There was never a plan to demolish the fountain—Colding-Jørgensen simply wanted to show how easy it was to create a relatively large group using social media.

He concludes -

Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government. This is the important point made by Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, who writes that “Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.”

There is a powerful political engine running in the streets of many cities. It turns at high speed and produces a lot of political energy. But the engine is not connected to wheels, and so the “movement” doesn’t move. Achieving that motion requires organizations capable of old-fashioned and permanent political work that can leverage street demonstrations into political change and policy reforms.

Back to the trade-off issue. As long as you do not suffer any of the consequences, it is easy to be pro or con on any topic, even enthusiastically pro or con. Showing up for a protest becomes a cognitive fashion statement, not a political act to effect change. Or so it seems. To effect change you have to give up one thing in order to accomplish another - you have to pay the price. There are a lot more people willing to go through the motions than there are people willing to actually pay the price.