Stewart, Smith, and Denton Response

Chapter 3 of Persuasion and Social Movements focuses on what the persuasive functions of a social movement are. It analyzes how social movements use persuasion to alter the perceptions of the protesters, as well as strategies for how movements should mobilize for action. The chapter is extremely detailed, including relevant historical figures in both the US and around the world, and the authors obviously want to present an unbiased examination of how social movements work. They do take the position of accepting social movements as important, but this doesn't place bias in either direction.
I enjoyed the section on how movements must alter the perceptions of the protesters. This is something new, as everything we've read up to now has focused on how movements use rhetoric to alter the perceptions of the oppressors or unmoved masses, so it was interesting to learn how movements 'transfer perceptions of reality' among their own supporters. I do think that all of these 7 subsections of chapter 3 translate to digital activism, but even this section alone translates very well. I have mentioned before that I believe digital activism lacks a sense of intimacy, or intimacy-likeness, and movements must use this strategy in order to change that in their favor. Maintaining the power to change the perception or narrative reality of the audience is, on its own, enough to be a primary focus for social movements, because that is the mission objective of activism: to educate the public and to bring about change.