making digital activism smarter

As I've written before, the Meta-Activism Project is putting together a data set of digital activism cases called the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS).  Today we're on track to hit 800.  The vast majority of cases are what one might call "liberal" or "progressive" - supportive of human rights, freedom of expression, and accountability.  However, we often hear that digital technology is morally neutral and can be used to promote good or evil: From Gaurav Mishra of Gauravonomics: It has also become evident that the internet itself, like any other technology, is neutral and value-agnostic.  So, it can be used for free expression and activism, but it can also be used for propaganda and surveillance. From Chris Van Buren, writing for the Internet and Democracy Project: Cell phones, Facebook and Twitter are morally neutral. Although they can be positive tools of ...

Capoeira is a dance style developed by Brazil's enslaved Africans in the 17th century. Its graceful flips, spins, and sweeping kicks (video) mask its true purpose as a means for the enslaved to practice their fighting skills: capoeria is a war dance.  While capoeria  was eventually illegalized, the dance style served to fool the slave owner class.  The word "capoeria" itself is mocking.  It means "check coop" in Portuguese and was likely coined by slave owners who thought their slaves looked like flapping chickens as they practiced their martial dance form.  This term further camouflaged the very serious goals of capoeira.   The non-threatening perception protected the development of capoeira, which is practiced to this day. Capoeira is an interesting model for digital activism training in repressive regimes today.  Teach the people the skills of digital activism - documentation, publication, coordination - ...

by Mary Joyce (updated) What can digital technology actually do for activists?  The response to this question usually comes in the form of a long list of tools or a recounting of several case studies.  But what if we looked at these tools and cases in the aggregate and focused on the similarities?  Could we condense all the uses of digital technology into a few key functions? This is what scholars and trainers have been trying to do recently and its a question that I'm quite interested in.  Here is a list a what I think are the best functional typologies and then I'd be interested to hear what you think of them. The first, from 2008, is from the Quick ‘n Easy Guide to Online Advocacy by the info-activism training organization Tactical Technology Collective: 1) Mobilising and Coordinating 2) Documenting and Visualizing 3) Informing and ...

Talking about the digital divide is a bit passé. It was once a major issue. According to digital policy expert Sonia Arrison, in the late nineties "the Rev. Jesse Jackson called the digital divide 'classic apartheid,' the NAACP's Kweisi Mfume dubbed it 'technological segregation,' and President Clinton urged a 'national crusade'." International institutions funded programs to study and go about closing the divide. Yet as the number of people connected to the Internet soars year upon year - and the number of people with mobile phones increases even faster - it seems that the majority of the world's citizens could easily be connected within a generation through market forces alone. In Digital Activism Decoded (PDF), the chapter on the digital divide, "Economic and Social Factors: The Digital (Activism) Divide," is largely positive, noting the empowerment of ...

by Mary Joyce Most digital activism campaigns use apps and devices not explicitly designed for activism: Twitter, Facebook, email, blogs, SMS.  There are a few applications designed for activists, like the secure email system RiseUp.net, the social network Crabgrass (also a RiseUp project), the database application Martus, and SMS encryption application Guardian.  That these applications have relatively small user bases need not be a problem - after all, most technology users are not activists.    However, they also have a minority user base among activists, most of whom use commercial applications. In some cases, there is no problem with activists using commercial platforms.   Activists get on these platforms the way everyone else does - because their friends are using them - and this mass user base also makes it easy to broadcast to a large audience: think of the use of Facebook in ...

by Mary Joyce Earlier this week, the site Wikileaks and a handful of newspapers around the world published 90,000 American military  logs on the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. For some historical perspective, here are a few comparisons between the leak of the Afghan reports and the leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a 7000-page internal report on Vietnam that revealed lies by multiple presidents on the motivation and conduct of that war. While we may argue about similarities between the content and impact of these two leaks, the differences in their means of publication - one in the broadcast era and one in the digital era - are nothing short of staggering. Copying 1969: Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, begins xeroxing copies of the report.  He plans to distribute these copies to ...

It seems that there are ever more people coming around to the reality that the piecemeal approach to digital activism isn't working and that we need to begin more rigorous and comprehensive analysis. One of these people is Lucy Bernholz: founder of Blueprint Research + Design for Philanthropy, blogger at Philanthropy 2173, and fellow at the New America Foundation.  In a recent post on her blog, Lucy lays out a strong argument against anecdote and for rigorous analysis of what works (and what doesn't): ...for too long, we've been arguing about the power of the internet to change politics mostly with anecdotes (I'll take your "#iranelection" and raise you one "One Million Voices Against the FARC") and snippets of data.  We need a more rigorous level of research into what works and what doesn't work. I'm not saying that all of ...

by Mary Joyce Launched this past January in a speech by Secretary Clinton,  "21st century statecraft" attempts to push American diplomacy into the digital age.  Yet, as revealed in a recent article in the New York Times magazine, there seems to be a significant gap between what the proponents of 21st century statecraft believe and the policies they pursue. The beliefs including ending the era of "white guys with white shirts... determining the relationship", replacing ideology with openness, and broadcast with conversation.  Yet the policies described in the article reveal a shift in the type of "white men in white shirts" making policy decisions: away from career diplomats and towards young staffers and technology entrepreneurs. The article opens with a full-page photo (left) of the two young leaders of this movement - Jared Cohen and Alec Ross- walking in front of ...

by Mary Joyce Likes many of my peers, I am currently reading  "CS by CS" (Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky).  The book does an excellent job of clarifying, synthesizing, and highlighting some of the best new thought on digital technology and society in recent years, including ideas from Shirky's earlier book, Here Comes Everybody. Shirky has a preternatural gift for distilling complex ideas into elegant metaphors.  What Yochai Benkler referred to as "capital-intensive  projects toward a production and organizational strategy that could justify the investments" in his 2006 book The Wealth of Networks, Shirky dubs simply "Gutenburg economics". Early in Shirky's book, he addresses the reduction in the quality of published content in the digital age: "the easier it is for the average person to publish, the more average what gets published becomes." We are seeing the same phenomenon in digital activism.  As ...

by Mary Joyce Imagine you want to win a race.  You begin training every day, change your diet, and greatly reduce your time.  You're in the best shape of your life.   However, on the day on the race, you finish two seconds late and lose the race.  Instead of being the guy in the middle leaping over the finish line, you're the guy in the white shirt who almost made it. Was this a success or a failure? In digital activism, this kind of situation occurs all the time.  Activists are successful in completing the tactics they have laid out for themselves (getting thousands of people in the street, developing a coherent message, building a flexible organization) but they fail in their ultimate goal (overthrowing a dictatorial government, throwing out the results of a rigged election).  The 2009 post-election mobilization in ...