Eurgh, Can anyone make sense of this question.
In the last decade or so, campaigners organizing protests and demonstrations have become more media savvy, exploiting new technologies. Evaluate how effective protestors have been in communicating their message via mass media, and discuss how far this challenges academic literature about the reporting of demonstrations and protests.
I have no bloody idea how to answer that and I need to write a plan for it by tomorrow. I emailed my tutor asking him to explain and he hasnt replied, arse.
How to structure this task:
First, separate the questions that you are required to answer. In this case the questions are:
1) Evaluate how effective protestors have been in communicating their message via mass media, and
2) Discuss how far this challenges academic literature about the reporting of demonstrations and protests.
In 1) you should probably first define what "mass media" is, before answering the exact question. The same goes with the word "effective". Effective can mean a lot of things, but the correct interpretation in this case must be:
gaining maximum results with as little resources spent as possible. After you have defined those two key terms, you should evaluate how protestors have been able to achieve this using mass media technologies (which you can probably answer a lot better than I can, because I haven't read anything on the topic. But this is where your particular knowledge come into play.)
I sense that 2) is part of a much broader question of the place of literature (as sort of an 'old' form of 'technology') in a world that has seen a lot of progress in the area of communication-technology. I think you can use this perspective for your evaluation ("discussion"), but you also need to connect it to the actual topic at hand.