"Room For Debate," by the New York Times had an interesting topic of discussion about whether boycotts work or not. There were two sides to the argument. One being that boycotts do work because they cause changes to the organization or business that is being affected. The other side believes that it takes a lot of effort and sometimes the result is not worth the work.
My stance on this is that people should boycott when necessary. When looking back at history, there are a good number of leaders who led an entire movement by boycotting something. Leaders such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ceasar Chavez. Boycotts shaped and molded our country in many ways. The Boston Tea Party could be considered a boycott because tea was thrown into the sea due to heavy taxation on the product. That particular event had a domino effect that eventually led to the liberation of the American colonies All in all, when done correctly, boycotts can be highly effective.
What is your position on the subject? Do you agree or disagree with my opinion? Are boycotts as effective now as they were in years past?
I believe most boycotts are not as effective today as they were in the past because of the over flow of information released by the internet. Its much more harder today to support a movement when the are multiple groups of people who oppose it, or follow other online groups that oppose the reasoning for it. The Nike boycott in 2019 did not do so well because most people have the internet to search up the reason for the boycott and make up their own mind on whether or not they want to boycott. Boycotts work when you have massive amounts of people supporting it, and this could only happen through ignorance on the subject or through natural law.
ReplyDeleteThis is a serious topic because of what happened about a month ago. I think boycotts can be as effective as they used to be, but the way they played out recently decreased the effectiveness; the looting is what I am talking about specifically. Looting the stores was more of a robbery than a boycott. It doesn’t really have as big of an impact on society because of the personal benefit aspect of it. In my opinion, I think most of the people that looted were not doing it for the cause, they just solely saw the opportunity and used the riots as an excuse to make it okay. I feel like the looting made it harder for people to change their minds on the topic, because it gave the opposing side of the boycotts something to feed their arguments and prove their points, as selfish as that may be. The riots were okay more or less, because it is like throwing the tea into the harbor, which turned out to be very effective. However you still need to be careful with that because there have been some innocent people’s hard work destroyed by rioters. All in all, the personal benefit of looting should not have been a part of these very serious and important boycotts, they need to be influential for America's sake.
ReplyDeleteWhat's different about boycotting in history and boycotting now is how much the population, and people's opinions have grown over time. As much as boycotting used to work in the past, it doesn't have much of a long-term effect now. I for one do not believe a lot of things that I see on the internet, so for a huge boycott to take place, everyone would have to be highly educated, and most people are not willing to learn. Unless it is for a huge cause, I feel the media would not exploit any boycott. In today's age it's hard to see that certain boycotts even do anything negative to the brand or place.
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