In a post a few weeks ago, Mary started us down the path of “Ok, all this chatter about digital this and activism that.  What constitutes digital activism anyway?”  Obviously we’ve got to start thinking about this, or else MAP has no reason to exist, so let’s keep at it.  Mary said, very rightly so:

“For digital activism to be a new field, the addition of digital technology to activism practice must be a change of kind not just degree.”

Are we creating a different type of activism is the question we have in front of us.

I want to push this discussion further, because I think there’s some good stuff nestled in this concept of degree vs kind.

If we think about it simply, most uses of digital technologies are amplifying existing processes:

• I can now reach 1000 people on Twitter with my 140 characters rather than the 50 I had on my email list serve.
• Friends of friends on Facebook can now see my posting, and can pass it along with the click of a mouse, rather than just my friends viewing something static.
• Geomapping technologies can now put me on my street, rather than in my by neighborhood.

And the examples go on.  But I want to argue that, in fact, by increasing the degree of many of these actions, a new kind is often being created.

Take a look at my awesome napkin drawings below, using the “Iranian Revolution” as an example [Note: the purpose here is not to analyze the use of Twitter in this case....I want to demonstrate simply some of the actions that occurred]:

World One: The world before traditional forms of communication (newspapers, telephones, TV) and a few digital ones (email, mobile) were used.

Before Digital Tools on Steroids

The lines of communication are mostly uni-directional coming out of Iran, with a few “maybes” in other directions such as back to Iran or to another part of the world.  Sometimes those less frequent instances of communication would reach the “right” person or organization, but sometimes not.  Sometimes they would create a positive result, but sometimes not.  The chances of doing either were just plain slimmer.

World Two: The one where digital – mobile phones, computers, social networks, etc – was the dominant source of communication.

[Note: The main part of this is the scribbles, representing back-and-forth, enormous numbers of communication instances.  The caption says "Amplification not possible before."]

Digital Tools on Steroids!

The lines of communications are one-to-many or many-to-many.  They were, in almost all cases, bi- or multi-directional, creating a “buzz.”  There was an increase in number of opportunities and ways that people inside Iran had to disseminate the message, the number of people the message reached, the number of occurrences of word-of-mouth, the number of directions the message went in – and all of these increased by an order of magnitude.

This order of magnitude increase in these key things (and others) – the change in their degree – created a fundamentally new way of communicating messages.

So then, my questions to you, moving forward:

How do we think about degree and kind?

What do we do with something that looks like we’ve just increased or augmented a few things creates something that couldn’t have had the same effects otherwise?

How do we interpret when a digital technology sparks a fundamentally different way of communicating with others… which would then spark a fundamentally different strategy for message-creation?

Does this new form of digital message-creation mean we have a new form of activism?

What the HECK are we witnessing here?

Mary closed her argument with the following:

“….new phenomena that demonstrate that digitally-networked global infrastructure does fundamentally change activism possibilities, that digital activism represents not only a change of degree, but also of kind.  The digital activism of automation is indeed little more than activism + digital, but the digital activism of innovation, of new possibilities, represents the existence a new field of study and of practice.”

If everyone agrees with that (come on, just nod your head and say ok!) then I say we’ve got something new, and something we need to start talking about as it’s own thing.