Aug

Before the Streets: Digital Precursors to Mass Mobilization

In my last post I spoke of my desire to see how big the digital activism “iceberg” is, to study the many unnoticed actions that precede highly visible “Twitter Revolutions” and mass digital mobilizations. In my current task for the Global Digital Activism Data Set I am inputting posts from Global Voices‘ “cyber-activism” category. I started out with recent cases and am now back in 2007. And 2007 is interesting.

In 2007, few of the dramatic digital activism cases had yet occurred, but you can see the seeds of mass mobilization. So far, one of the biggest predictor of mass mobilization seems to be active and politically-aware digital communities and smaller digital campaigns. Here I’ll present three examples of the pre-cursors to major digital mobilizations.

Colombia

Colombia’s great digital mobilization is One Million Voices Against the FARC, a massive international protest movement in the winter of 2008 against the terrorism perpetrated by FARC guerrillas. However, there were several digital precursors to this action. Back in the spring of 2007, bloggers started talking about their own lack of political engagement. One blogger even wrote about the FARC: “There are more than 3 thousand Colombians kidnapped at this moment, which under no circumstance should be allowed.” That same year, a smaller digital anti-FARC campaign was started, Free Emanuel, a popular blog-based campaign to free a young child held hostage by the FARC. Also in that year bloggers helped to organize Colombia’s first Internet Week, both a sign of the growing digital engagement of Colombian society and of netizen’s ability to self-organize. In fact, Colombia had been using digital technology for activism for almost a decade: the transparency web site Congreso Visible was founded in 1998.

Kenya

There are other examples of netizen coordination predating important acts of digital activism. The Kenyan Blogs Webring, a community of cross-linking blogs, was born in 2004. Mzalendo: Eye on Kenyan Parliament, one of the first digital transparency initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa, was created by one of the web ring’s founders in 2006. In early 2008, members of the webring came together to create the SMS mapping software platform Ushahidi in the aftermath of a violently contested election. Ushahidi is now probably the most prominent and widely used piece of software created specifically for activists.

Iran

And yes, what about Iran, the most dramatic of digitally-enabled protest? Before people came out on the streets in June of 2009, Iran already had a vibrant and politically-engaged blogosphere, had already seen mass digital campaigns like One Million Signatures for women’s rights of 2006, the 14Mordad blog campaign to free jailed students in 2007, and the 2008 Google-bomb campaign in support of Gaza. There was certainly no guarantee of mass digital mobilization, but multiple contributing factors were present a year before the 2009 protests.

None of this implies the direct causation of a technologically deterministic statement like “strong blogosphere = revolution” but, as in the analogue era, the ability of members of an opposition to create dense networks where they can discuss, coordinate, and mobilize offline make these kinds of actions more likely.

The moral here is not that certain digital contexts lead inexorably to digital revolutions, only to encourage those who seek to read the digital tea leaves to look at the causal factors that have preceded mass mobilizations in the past and to look for the telling details in current cases of digital contestation.

Images: Mark Petersen, DataBlog, Touch Iran

992 days ago Short URL Comments

Methodology

global voices/research

Aug

How Big is the Iceberg?

Today the Global Digital Activism Data Set hit 500 cases, and it is still growing. Part of this is due to the great diversity of digital activism campaigns, but most of it is due to the small acts of digital activism that don’t make the national or international media. For every Iran or Moldova “Twitter Revolution” there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of smaller campaigns (many unsuccessful), or bloggers bringing taboo topics like government corruption and domestic violence into the public sphere. For every case where digital technology clearly led to the success of a campaign there are dozens more cases where digital technology was just one tool among many deployed, and it is difficult to isolate causality. This is at least what the data is revealing so far.

So why include these merkier cases in the data set? Why include cases of bloggers “raising awareness” or a campaign that has a Facebook page but also uses many offline tools? Why not only focus on the clear successes, the dramatically digital campaigns? The reason is that the dramatic successes like People Power II represent only the tip of the digital activism iceberg. We want to see how big the iceberg is, what small yet significant cases lie below the surface.

There is currently a debate as to whether digital activism empowers the activist, empowers the oppressor, or doesn’t give either the upper hand. Through our data collection we are seeing that all these cases exist, depending on context. So everyone wins the debate. Now we can move on to more interesting questions.

Image: Ralph Clevenger

997 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Global Digital Activism Data Set

Aug

What Digital Tech Can Do For Activists: The Short Answer

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 Communicating
4) Bypassing and Accessing

The second is from Anastasia Kavada‘s chapter “Activism Transforms Digital: The Social Movement Perspective,” which starts on page 101) in Digital Activism Decoded (PDF).

1) Accessing and Discovering Information
2) Disseminating Information and Reporting from the Streets
3) Coordinating and Making Decisions
4) Building Solidarity and a Sense of Collective Identity

The third, which is limited to social media, is from the introduction (PDF) to Beth Kanter and Allison Fine‘s new book The Networked Nonprofit:

1) Conversation starters like blogs, YouTube, and Twitter
2) Collaboration tools including wikis and Google Groups
3) Network builders like social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter

The fourth is mine.
It is still a work in progress:

1) Record: To encoding of information into a digital format.
2) Reveal: To publish or otherwise disseminate information.
3) Protect: To limit access to information
4) Process: To refine raw information into more useful form by grouping it or connecting it to other information
5) Co-Create: To collaborate in order to generate a online or offline product.
6) Aggregate: To bring together information, resources, or people.

These four sources are written by authors, focusing on different niches of digital technology for different intended audiences, yet the challenge is clear: How to you distill hundreds of cases and dozens of tools into a handful of functions that are both exhaustive and mutually exclusive in that they encompass all relevant phenomena while having minimal internal overlap? The goal of creating a list of functions which fulfills the divergent goals of brevity and breadth is not easy.

So, what do you think? Is any of them perfect? How might they be re-mixed?

Images: drcorneilus, Mykl Roventine, AugustaGALiving, boklm / Flickr

1001 days ago Short URL 5 Comments

Building Knowledge/Interdisciplinarity

Aug

Our Data Set Has a Waiting List

by Mary Joyce

The Global Digital Activism Data Set is the first attempt to quantitatively study digital activism as a global phenomenon. It is an all-volunteer project to create an open case study database under a Creative Commons license that will be accessible to scholars and activists around the world. It currently has 342 cases, with over 1,500 cases waiting to be entered… and that’s our challenge.

When I first announced the project, I thought it would be difficult to find hundreds of cases of digital activism. I thought we’d get them bit by bit: three from this newspaper, two from this blog, one from this PhD student. But in reality there are already hundreds of cases that have been written up by other organizations, like Global Voices, which has over 1000 cases of digital activism in their archives.

So our job is easier. We don’t need to find cases. But we have a new problem. We have a waiting list of over 1,500 digital activism cases waiting to be put into the data set. We are looking for volunteers to help us with this task. It’s easy, you:

1. Send an email to – Mary AT Meta-Activism DOT org – (that’s me) to say you are interested in volunteering and how many hours you want to give.
2. Receive a list of blog posts to input into the database.
3. Use this quick online form to submit yours cases: bit.ly/yourcase

We already have seven volunteers working on this project, but we need more people… like you! I hope to hear from you.

Image: RealEstateZebra/Flickr

1002 days ago Short URL Comments

Global Digital Activism Data Set

volunteer

Aug

Clicktivism, Schmictivism. Move on, literally.

Last week, The Guardian ran a piece called “Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism,” (12 August 2010) by Micah White. The basis of it was that digital activism has been diminished to mere tallying of things like clicks, email subscribers, Facebook followers… you name it.

While he offers a small glimmer of hope at the end, rallying digital activists to “jettison the consumerist ideology of marketing that has for too long constrained the possibility of social revolution,” he paints a pretty dismal picture of how digital activism campaigns are now run: just like marketers, it’s all about the numbers and how many you can get and nothing more.

The huge glaring problem with this piece? It stops there. It stops at giving a laundry list of campaigns that advertise a huge “member” base and the fact that digital activism has become nothing more than a numbers game.

Dave Karpf responded by highlighting how many activists have used this marketing model since well before the dawn of the internet (“Let’s move past the tired Clicktivism critiques please,” 12 August 2010). One of Dave’s main points is the fact that, in White’s criticism, there was no discussion or even mention of the process put in place after those clicks occur, the Ladder-of-Engagement.

He argues that “actual social justice organizing looks nothing like the fiction White compares digital activism to. Organizing is hard work. We create change by building power and mobilizing relationships, applying pressure on decision-makers that would prefer we went away. Real activism (to use White’s own phrase) isn’t about “the power of ideas or the poetry of deeds.”"

[Sidenote: Dave points to a great example of White's worst passage, although I'd be prone to pick "Exchanging the substance of activism for reformist platitudes that do well in market tests, clicktivists damage every genuine political movement they touch. In expanding their tactics into formerly untrammelled political scenes and niche identities, they unfairly compete with legitimate local organisations who represent an authentic voice of their communities. They are the Wal-Mart of activism: leveraging economies of scale, they colonise emergent political identities and silence underfunded radical voices."]

On that note, I’d also like to have a marketing discussion with you.

As a marketing strategist and social media marketer who’s had many clients in the private and the non-profits spaces, I can’t tell you how many organizations I’ve seen that have tried to base success on click-through-rates, RSS subscriptions, Twitter followers etc. When those people become our clients, we sit them down day one and have a conversation about what success means to them. 100% of the time, success is not actually the number of followers they’ve got on any given social network or email list. It’s “more money (profit or donations), more supporters, more influence, more brand awareness, etc”. We make it clear that to accomplish those goals, you have to turn the numbers into something valuable – and that’s what we ultimately end up working with them on. It does no good if you have 10,000 Twitter followers if your goal is to create actionable, organized social change. Your 10,000 mean nothing. Zilch.

My point is that, if we’re going to rip apart this idea of Clicktivism, and basing everything on numbers etc, I’d like for Mr White to run his analysis of how these organizations turned those numbers into value for themselves. I would bet you that MoveOn has achieved what it would consider tremendous success from their “measly click-throughs.”

How? They went past the numbers and linked them to something more engaging than a click, which is only the first rung of the Ladder-of-Engagement. When White discusses the loss of passion for a cause, or, as Dave put it, the loss of soul of Digital Activism, he doesn’t look at the clicks that were turned into passionate supporters.

Esra’a hit the nail on the head in her post “Is digital activism ruined?,” (12 August 2010). One of her observations jumped out at me:

“We have people who really do preach that clicking a petition or a link or simply RTing something is “enough,” when it isn’t. Our job is to communicate how and why it isn’t � often we fail, because we ARE dealing with an overwhelmingly lazy (and sometimes numb or unaware generation) � even right here in the Middle East. I think this is something we digital activists have been dealing with for many years and only now it is being discussed on a larger scale.”

The real deal? This isn’t just a digital activism problem. Unfortunately for White, he simply drew a comparison between bad digital activist campaigns and bad marketing campaigns. Anyone worth their stuff as a marketer will tell you that the numbers is only the first step, and that those numbers must be linked to a strategy and goals if the campaign is going to be a success.

Mary added a comment supporting the idea of needing to put all of these “measurements” that White talks about in the context of a strategic framework.

“I utterly agree with you Esra’a � [clicktivism,] the bottom rung of digital activism (RTing, changing an avatar) is just that � the bottom rung, the first step. Strategic organizers can mobilize these people who self-identify as caring about a cause to take more significant actions with greater impact. Only intentional nay-sayers or people who don’t understand the mechanics of activism would equate the failure to mobilize “clicktivists” to achieve campaign goals with the failure of digital technology for activism. Just as in the offline world, digital campaigns are multi-faceted, including a range of tactics for a range of supporters over a long time horizon.”

It’s only then that we can begin to make sense of the numbers, and understand their true impact.

What do you think about Clicktivism? Does it have it’s place in Digital Activism?

1005 days ago Short URL 6 Comments

Interdisciplinarity

campaigns/clicktivism/guardian/micah white/mobilization/slacktivism/Success

Aug

Esra'a Al Shafei in Fast Company Magazine

I was delighted to read a familiar name in the current issue of Fast Company magazine. In an article entitled “Is TED the New Harvard?”, Meta-Activism Project Board of Advisers member Esra’a Al Shafei talks about the effect that being a TEDGlobal fellow had on her organization, Mideast Youth, and their new project, CrowdVoice (profiled here). From the article:

Esra’a Al Shafei is a 23-year-old from Bahrain who runs an online hub for journalism and free expression called MideastYouth.com. In 2009, she was made a TED Fellow at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. “TED gives you a sense of credibility,” she says. “I’ve been running Mideast Youth for four years, but before the fellowship, nobody talked about it.” TED connections have led her to sources of technical and moral support that helped her launch CrowdVoice, which tracks voices of protest around the world.

Image: Fast Company (with added cartoon image)

1005 days ago Short URL Comments

Building Knowledge

CrowdVoice

Aug

The Cruel Depths of the Digital Divide

Talking about the digital divide is a bit pass�. 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 existing elites, but also focusing on leapfrogging and the more subtle skills divide among people who are already connected. The Digital Divide Network, started in 1999 to build international collaboration to combat the problem went dormant in 2005 for lack of attention and was recently turned into a static archive because of the large amount of spam on its message boards. It is now a digital graveyard, a reminder of past interest in the problem, and the current lack of interest.

Yet an excellent photo essay from The New York Times Magazine reminds us of other graveyards of the digital divide. As the rich and highly -connected worry about the reception problems of the iPhone 4, children in Ghana burn donated computers in the hopes of extracting metals for resale (photo left). Not only is this another story of the terrible effects of e-waste on human and environmental health, it is also an irony of well-meaning attempts to close the digital divide: many of the computers that find their way to the Agbogbloshie dump are second-hand donations from the US and Europe. Rather than helping the children of Africa to bridge the digital divide, these machines are poisoning them with toxic levels of lead and PCBs.

There is no easy answer to this problem of the extremely poor not only being left out of the digital revolution but also being victimized by it. Much of the blame should be laid on the wasteful and insouciant consumption of the rich world, so well explained in the short film The Story of Stuff. The rich technology users of the world – myself included – should use this as a reminder of the ugly (and largely hidden) effects of the technology boom. Next time you are considering the purchase of a new gadget, remember that in a few years it will be poisoning the soil of Ghana (or India, or China…) and ask yourself if you really need it.

Image: Pieter Hugo

1007 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Building Knowledge/Digital Activism and Power

digital divide/e-waste/poverty

Aug

Liberation Technology and Digital Activism

by Mary Joyce (updated)

Liberation technology is “any form of information and communication technology that can expand political, social, and economic freedom”. It is the focus of a new program at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and the subject of an excellent article by Larry Diamond in the July issue of the Journal of Democracy (PDF h/t Patrick Meier) .

I see liberation technology as having a certain overlap with digital activism in campaigns that support the values of freedom, but there are important distinctions. Digital activism is defined as “the practice of using digital technology to increase the effectiveness of a social or political change campaigns.” However, the particular change outcome of a digital activism campaign is quite broad. In some cases, such as those described in the destructive activism chapter of Digital Activism Decoded (PDF), the goals of these campaigns are counter the interests of freedom.

In addition, as its name implies, liberation technology takes the applications and devices of digital activism – the technology itself – as the the lens through which this phenomena is viewed. Digital activism broadly writ includes the technology element but can be seen through a variety of lenses, such as social movement theory, which focuses on the actions of groups of individuals and sees the tools they use as merely instrumental.

Finally, liberation technoology can exist outside the bounds of activism. The Ministry of Health allowing patients to access their personal health files online would increase freedom of information, yet it is not an example of activism, which is generally extra-institutional. Likewise, a farmer using a mobile phone to learn market prices for his produce gains economic freedom through his technology use, but is not engaged in a campaign for social or political change.

My interest in studying digital activism is founded on a fundamental belief in human agency, that we must understand digital activism better so that we can make intervention to increase its effectiveness in promoting the causes of freedom, justice, and human dignity. As such, the cause of liberation technology is near and dear to my heart. I am really looking forward to seeing how Stanford’s new program – and this new field – develops.

Image: Program on Liberation Technology

1009 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Defining Digital Activism

Aug

SXSW Panel Option: Ending the Lazy Discourse of Digital Activism

We’ve submitted a panel to SXSW, which is now in public voting stages. If the topic below sounds like one that you’d like to hear, please consider voting for it on the Panel Picker. Of course, if you know anyone else who might benefit from the topic, feel free to pass it along to them.

Description:

We’ve been asking the same questions about digital activism for years now: Does digital technology give activists or repressive governments an advantage? Are these technologies actually changing the dynamics of political or social power or is it just hype? We’ve got cyber-utopians and cyber-pessimists, but are both overstating their cases? We’ve dissected siloed cases of digital activism to death � the Iranian Revolution, the No Mas FARC Facebook page � but have we developed any long-lasting frameworks? But it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any closer to the answers. What do we really know about digital activism anyway?? The reason we aren’t closer to answering these questions is that we’re stuck in lazy discourse and un-winnable ping-pong debates based on sets of contradictory narratives and messy comparisons across different contexts. We lack a standard for analysis, leaving us in a free-for-all where legitimacy is based mostly on the boldness of claims and the catchiness of neologisms. The goal of this panel is to move the discussion of digital activism in a direction that supports development of foundational knowledge… and eventually a bonified field of discourse and study. We’ll spend some time constructively dissecting the current problems in how digital activism is discussed and debated and get right to the meat of what we really SHOULD be talking about in order to identify concrete ways to move the field forward.

Questions Answered

How can we characterize the current discourse on digital activism?
Why is this current method of discourse inadequate?
How can we increase rigor and analysis in the field?
How can we turn the current discussion into a more productive one, and make progress towards developing frameworks and the foundation for a long-term field of study?
What can we glean from the current debates on issues like slactivism, or the cyber-utopian/cyber-pessimist divide that is more constructive, useful and progressive?

1011 days ago Short URL Comments

Meta-Meta (about MAP)

digital activism/Panel picker/SXSW

Aug

Two Paradigms of Digital Activism

At the Guardian Activate Summit last month, social media entrepreneur Gaurav Mishra (full disclosure: we dated) argued that there are two digital activism paradigms: information and inspiration:

In the first paradigm of digital activism, you work with a disadvantaged group that suffers from limited access to even the most basic information and tools for self-expression. So, you use simple-to-use digital devices like Nokia mobile phones and Flip video cameras and simple-to-use digital technologies like text messages and online video to enable them to access basic information and share their own stories….

In the second paradigm of digital activism, you work with a group that is anything but disadvantaged. This group is at ease with using always on internet and mobile devices, both for instantaneous access to information and for self-expression and social interaction. Here, the digital activist isn’t trying to solve a crisis of capability, but a crisis of caring. Here, the aim is not to empower with information, but to engage with inspiration.

As my italics indicate, I think Mishra’s real point is not about information vs. inspiration, but rather about the much thornier dichotomy of privileged and not. In the first paradigm, the disadvantaged are given tools to act on their own behalf. In the second, the “advantaged” act as digital advocates for the disadvantaged.

There are very intelligent people who are interested in the second paradigm – using digital tools to solve the “crisis of caring” of the privileged for the less privileged. Social media commentator Ethan Zuckerman frequently writes about using digital technology to bridge this divide.

However, I believe that the ultimate goal in promoting digital activism should be to help the disadvantaged speak for themselves. Trying to convince the advantaged to care for the disadvantaged reinforces and to some extent condones this power gap and robs the disadvantaged of agency. If injustices are solved while old institutions of inequality remain intact, we are treating the symptons instead of the root causes of that injustice.