Things to Think About
From digmovements
[edit] Activism Online
- community
- collective identity
- democratic space
- political action
[edit] Features of An Online Project
- good
- speed
- reach
- large numbers
- can create sophisticated discourse
- bad
- problems with fact checking, verification
- new notions of credibility, vetting
- resilience of traditional power structures
- can create drek
[edit] Early Text Based Outreach
- technologies
- usenet grups
- discussion lists
- FTP sites
- document types
- protest letters
- online petitions
- strategies
- subvert corporate hierarchies, email the CEO
- recirculate, create form letters
[edit] Hacktivism
- trolling
- lurking
- spin
- crashing servers and virtual sit-ins
- parody and decoy sites
- vandalism and criminal mischief
[edit] Online Alliances
- good
- cross pollination of ideas
- builds activist networks
- increases reach
- limits
- can dilute purpose, confuse cause
- uneven funding
- uneven commitment
- uneven or competing leaderships
[edit] Tilly's Cautionary Thoughts on Social Movements and the Web
- irony of anti-globalization movements going global using globalizing technologies
- can increase problems of coordination and control in established, RL movements
- can dilute commitment by making it easy to click and be done
- can bifurcate movements into global and local activists, disrupting national and regional alliances
- tech savvy and rich vs tech excluded and poor
- local leaderships can get distracted and/or recruited into web work and away from local concerns
[edit] Typologies of Web Activism
- web based born digital
- web enhanced already existing
- awareness/outreach - education and information
- organization/mobilization - calls for offline or RL action
- action/reaction - hacktivism and online civil disobedience
[edit] Consuming vs Using Activist Websites
- surfing and clicking smotth activist sites can dumb you down
- outreach sites condition netizens to be passive readers dependent on experts
- merchandising and online fundraising conflates activism and consumerism
- clicking on petitions and forwarding form emails is too easy and not enough
- best way to avoid this
- inform yourself at sites with social media options and use them
- two-way communication, collaboration of experts and readers, creates reform community ownership of knowledge
[edit] Week Seven Scorecard for Online Activism
- What the web is enough for:
- organize events
- build coalitions between groups
- viral information delivery for RL events - reach and speed
- spark interest and outrage
- What the web is not enough for:
- f2f local activism
- virtual events and chats suck
- online content still inaccessible to lots of people
- remaining current requires motivation
- irritating smart asses are made more irritating and smart ass
- Web is US-centric
- other cultures find American pop culture morally offensive
- intrusive and colonizing
- the way images and media are read differs in a Walter Ong way, especially in areas recently electrified
- Social media applications are dumbing down a new generation of users
- don't have to learn the liberal arts of web dev
- social media can give a false sense of engaged usership
- Myspace, Facebook, etc, mostly narcissistic and unhelpful for serious reform causes
[edit] Memorable Quotes from Seminar
- "Facebook is the Walmart of identity."
- "User friendly or user stupid."
- "Does God have a Myspace page?"
- "You are what you link."
- "The internet IS amazing unless you don't have it."
[edit] Online Insurgency
- in the absence of civil rights, the web can serve
- media relay
- global witnessing
- networking
- reconceive community, either de-territorize or re-territorialize it
- disparate web content can create narrative when taken together
- US media coverage on the web inadvertently portrayed Iraq as victim of US aggression
- links do more than link; they define sympathies and ideologies
- information becomes a commodity when a market of interest in created
- distance lobbying by those with civil rights for those without
- fundraising
- recipe for successful insurgent websites
- media rich sites are more successful
- multilingual content
- local language for target reform audience
- western languages for outreach and solitication of support
- use an aesthetic of transgression to attract big media interest
- concept of deceptive scaling
- small groups can loom large with savvy, media rich sites
- the world can seem a city, a local town on fire the whole world
- small groups can confabulate their influence, legitmacy, and activities
- the oxymoron of assymetric warfare
- the American phantasmagoric reading of Al Qaeda online
[edit] More Lessons on Online Insurgency
- non state actors can penetrate global consciousness
- piggy back onto big media
- web content can augment and escalate change
- rebels fighting for national territory use transnational, nonspatial communication tools
- "global mediascape"
- the web employs all past communications technologies - text, photography, video
- cultural differences mediate their effects
[edit] Week Nine Scorecard
- Web 2.0 expands access to web publishing, but it feeds conformity.
- who you link to, and who links to you, reflects on you
- web encourages personal narcissism/isolation and acute global consciousness at the same time
- web can polarize individual consciousness, push it to extremes that each encourages passivity
- the web is different from things before it in number only
- but also in kind, as existing strategies are adapted, and ultimately, transformed by it
[edit] I've Learned Something Today
- the web is not a panacea
- the internet and the web are two different things
- the web is not a "place"
- it is also not a commons-without-scarcity
