Note: A version of this article was published last week by the Indian magazine Pragati.

Both cyber-optimism and cyber-pessimism elide a more complex reality that combines elements of both positions. (Image: Flickr/Katie Tegtmeyer)

When citizens use digital hardware and software to bring about social and political change, it is called digital activism. But is this new type of activism more or less effective than the analog activism that preceded it?  Without empirical evidence, one is likely to answer this question based on one’s own temperament. A pessimist is likely to be a cyber-pessimist; an optimist is likely to be a cyber-optimist. When anecdotal evidence is brought to bear, these categories tend to persist. Patrick Meier, Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute, calls the debate between cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists “anecdotal ping-pong.” An optimist is likely to reference examples of digital success, like the Arab Spring in Egypt or the fight against SOPA/PIPA. Pessimists note the failed 2009 uprising in Iran or instances of so-called ‘slacktivism’, like KONY 2012, a campaign centering around a massively popular video, but which had little to no effect on its target, the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.

Moreover, both terms can be used  to challenge credibility.  An argument branded with the term “cyber-optimist” or “cyber-pessimist” is also branded with the charge of intellectual bias.  The opinions of those who see a more positive effect of digital technology on activism are branded “utopian” “fools.”  Those who refuse to see any good in digital activism are called “cyberrejectionist.”  So, while some people do have different worldviews on the effect of digital activism, these terms are not only descriptive, they are also used as ammunition to discredit an intellectual foe.   The divisive use of these terms distracts attention from the very real questions about the effect of digital technology on activism.

Some scholars, however, are getting beyond the hype.  In their 2011 book, Digitally Enabled Social Change, Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport proposed two ways of looking at the effect of digital technology on activism: scale change and model change. In a scale change, activists carry out the same activities as in the analog era, but more quickly, at larger scale, and at lower cost. An excellent example of this type of change is the e-petition. It collects signatures like a paper petition, but at larger scale, because it can be signed by anyone at any time, and at low cost, because is can be started and distributed for free. Scale change can be dramatic. When the killer of a young African-American boy was allowed to walk free in 2012, a Change.org e-petition demanding justice collected two million signatures in two weeks. Prosecution of Trayvon Martin’s killer was subsequently undertaken by the state. Yet other e-petitions languish online with few signatures or simply fail to influence their targets.

Model change supposes an effect that is qualitative rather than quantitative. The theory proposes that digital activism does not mean just more and cheaper activism, but a different kind of activism. But how is digital activism different than analog activism? Activism used to be organised by formal organisations, such as unions and advocacy organisations. Now it need not be. Neither the Arab Spring, nor the Occupy Movement, nor the 15M protests in Spain had formal centralised leaders. The efficiencies provided by social media allowed participants to organise themselves. In studying patterns of Twitter followership during the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, scholar Zeynep Tufekci pointed at new ways in which citizens grant influence to individuals by choosing to follow them on Twitter. Highly interactive leader selection, also used by the Pirate Party in Germany, is more responsive to popular opinion than analog forms of leadership structure. In other instances of activism, like the anti-Putin rallies that occurred before Russia’s 2012 election, action is facilitated rather than led. For one dramatic protest, in which protesters lined the Moscow ring road, participants signed up on a specially designed website that later vanished.

Yet digital technology can be harmful as well as helpful to activists, particularly in repressive regimes. In his 2011 book, The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov proposed an authoritarian trinity of digital technology: censorship, surveillance, and propaganda. While some governments, particularly in the Middle East, prefer to cut off unwanted political discussion and organisation, others prefer to watch it unfold to capture the perpetrators. In March of this year, the Government of Bangladesh began tracking bloggers and Facebook users in order to prosecute those making statements critical of Islam. Some more confident Governments, like Russia, not only block dissent and punish dissenters, but also step into the fray, making their own online arguments for the status quo using the full resources of the state.

Even in democracies, some propose that digital technology is bad for activism. In a famous 2011 article in The New Yorker, “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” the journalist and cultural commentator Malcolm Gladwell argued that the strong ties of offline relationships are significantly more effective than the weak-tie relationships of near-strangers who collaborate online. Referencing the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality in the United States, Gladwell mocks cyber-optimists, whom he believes would argue that the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. “would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail.” In Gladwell’s unnecessarily contemptuous analysis, digital activism is a poor substitute for the forms of activism that preceded it.

Yet many cases of digital activism resist clear categorization. They are neither successes nor failures, but fall in some middle ground. Was the Occupy Movement a success because of the hundreds of global mobilisations that occurred in the fall of 2012, without funding or central leadership, or is it a failure because those mobilisations had little effect on the systems of global capitalism that activists were protesting? Is China an example of an authoritarian state successfully admitting mass economic connectivity without any political effect or is even China losing political control of its internet as opinions, rumours, and satire spread through a rapidly expanding system of weibo microblogs?

Reality is more complicated than either cyber-optimism or cyber-pessimism. Technologies like Twitter, that allow coordination without formal leadership, also allow leaders to emerge, as happened in Egypt in 2011. Great successes of mobilisation may fail to achieve concrete change, as is the case of Occupy thus far. Even an old tactic, like a petition, can become the focal point of an innovative and highly digital campaign, like the campaign to demand justice for Trayvon Martin.

Cyber-optimism and cyber-pessimism elide and ignore these subtle distinctions in order to score rhetorical points. These arguments are possible because both cyber-optimist and cyber-pessimism are prospective positions: they seek to make claims about the future. It is easy to say that the future will be much better or much worse than the present. But the present is always more complicated. Digital technology does not have uniquely positive or negative effects on activism. Much depends on context, on the political system in which activists are operating, and on the complexity of the problem that they seek to remedy.   Continue reading →

President Obama spoke last night about what happened in Boston, but the person who really set the tone was comedian Patton Oswalt.  A few hours after the tragedy, and before President Obama spoke, he posted the following on his Facebook page:

screencap courtesy of UpWorthy.com

Before reading his post I was worried, worried that this tragedy would be yet another excuse for America to sink into an abyss of violence and hatred as it did after 9/11.  I was so relieved when I saw this pop up on Gawker yesterday afternoon, and to have seen it referenced again and again as people try to make sense of the tragedy.

Shortly after 9/11, President Bush famously framed the tragedy in terms of good vs. evil: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”  In his worldview, good and evil were well-matched and in mortal combat.  The allegiance of every individual (and nation) mattered in determining the outcome.  In Patton’s worldview there is also a contest between good and evil, but good has already won and always will.  The contrast is striking. Continue reading →

Evgeny Morozov is perhaps the most skilled contemporary practitioner of the rhetoric of contempt.  He seeks to win arguments (and attention) by treating ideas he dislikes with scorn and ridicule and by treating their proponents with mockery and cruelty.  He encourages this behavior in others.  The exchange below, which happened earlier today, is a good example.

When I first met Evgeny in 2008 he was a journalist, working for The Economist.  He was smart and entertaining. The mean-spirited  persona only came later.  He honed it on his (now abandoned) Foreign Policy blog, Net Effect, and then parlayed that persona and style of argument in a very successful and misleading book, The Net Delusion.  That book was published just as the Arab Spring was getting started.  It soon became clear that his argument – that those who are optimistic about the liberating power of the Internet are deluded – was simply untrue.

So he has turned his gaze to Silicon Valley and has started attacking Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales instead of the State Department. Yet he has maintained the rhetoric of contempt, inserting vitriol into important discussions, misleading the unsophisticated, and muddying the waters of real intellectual inquiry with ad hominem attack and straw man arguments.

I have not asked Evgeny about his rhetorical strategy, but I would bet that it is strategic.  I think Evgeny enjoys being contemptuous, but he is also smart enough to realize that it works.  The tweet at left, from Max Bulger, a student at Tufts University, is illuminating.  Evgeny won’t talk to a student about his ideas, but he will bait the big fish like Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly on Twitter to increase his own name recognition.  Evgeny has 36 thousand followers.  Jimmy Wales has nearly 82 thousand.  Tim O’Reilly has 1.7 million.  You do the math.  I bet Evgeny has.

So, this post is not a plea to Evgeny to stop using the rhetoric of contempt.  It works well for him, so he has no reason to stop.  It is rather a suggestion to others not to fall into his trap by responding or (worse yet) responding in kind, as Jimmy Wales did.  Don’t feed the (intellectual) troll.

A world of mass protest in 2011: What happened?

[UPDATED] In India the once mighty anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare has fizzled out. Following national elections, the energy of Mexico‘s #YoSoy132 student movement has also lost momentum. Many have written about the challenge of Egypt‘s people power movement in shifting from disrupting a dictatorial state to nudging a semi-democratic one. The Wikipedia timeline of the 15M protests of the indignados in Spain is thick with events throughout the summer of 2011, yet there is only one event in 2012: an attempt to revive the movement on its anniversary. In the US, Occupy in out of the spotlight and plans for a major protest at the Republican Conventionnext weekwill be litmus test of their continuing ability to mobilize.

All these movements experienced dramatic early moments of success demonstrated through unexpected mass street protests. All of these movements have so far been unable to continue that energy to achieve their (admittedly, extremely ambitious) goals of improving democracy and decreasing various form of corruption and elite misbehavior in their respective countries.

2011 was a tremendous year for global mass movements, but in 2012 these movements are abating. While the hard core of Occupy, Mexican student activists, and Egyptian democracy activists are still hard at work, the citizens that temporarily joined them appear to have returned to their daily lives.

Are new, digitally-enabled movements having greater difficulty maintaining momentum that past activist organizations? Or are we simply more aware of this problem because of improved coverage of these movements by citizen journalists and organizers themselves?

I tend to think it’s the latter, though I’d welcome alternative arguments. In the past, who would have reported on a citizen movement that wasn’t making news? Now citizen journalists fill the void and organizers can self-broadcast about their movements, even when not much is happening on the public stage.

The important point here is that thewax and wain of a movement’s ability to mobilize is normal. As Doug McAdam of Stanford University has explained in his theory of opportunity structures, factors outside the movement, like the political party in power, national economic stability, and even international relations, can affect the ability of a movement to make headway.

In the case of the American Civil Rights Movement, which even skeptics like Malcolm Gladwell hold up as a model of a successful movement, there were many periods of ebb and flow. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution abolished slavery and enshrined the rights of citizenship for former slaves after the Civil War. This historic progress was followed by many brutal decades of voter intimidation, economic marginalization, lynching, and legalsegregation. 1875 was the year of both the federalCivil Rights Act of 1875and theMississippi Planto intimidate blacks and suppress black voter registration and voting.

While elite activism continued (the NAACP was founded in 1909, a number of favorable Supreme Court decisions were made in the early 1950′s), it was not until the lynching of young Emmett Till in 1955 that the civil rights movement became a mass movement again. The brutal and racially-motivated murder of a black child inspired an outrage greater than the fear that had been carefully instilled in black Americans over the preceding decades. The Montgomery bus boycott, which most American schoolchildren are taught was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, began a few months later.

So let me preempt suggestions that this loss of momentum proves that digital movements are weaker than their pre-digital brethren. They may be, but we don’t know yet. Let’s wait and watch without prejudice.

Note: The images of the US and Mexico above show the Tea Party and Javier Sicilia, respectively, not Occupy and #YoSoy132.

Three models, two pop stars, the wives and daughters of powerful men: these are the women Fast Company magazine chose to include in theirLeague of Extraordinary Women.

AfterNewsweek/Daily Beast launched a Digital Power Indexwhichcame underlegitimate firefor excluding women (and people of color, and people outside the US)Fast Companyintroduced a list of sixty (come on, you couldn’t even try for a hundred?) extraordinary women in their July/August issue (left) who are “changing the world one girl or woman at a time”. Yet this list also has a problem – holding extraordinary women to a lower standard than it would extraordinary men.

The list does some things right. Good on Fast Company for noticing that women are awesome and making it their cover story and for including women of color and women outside the US. Seriously, this is a step forward.

Still, I think next time they could push themselves harder. A list of extraordinary men is unlikely to include male models or the husbands of powerful women. I am sure that Angela Merkel’s husband is an excellent person and if a male model started aCenter For Children Who Can’t Read Good, then that makes me really happy, but they would certainly not rank as extraordinary. Yet somehow, women in this position are extraordinary in the eyes ofFast Company.

The problem here is not a lack of amazing women. The problem is thatFast Company applies a double standard. Factors that would make us less impressed with a man’s achievements – nepotism, the post-hoc do-gooding of celebs, being the employee of a corporate foundation – are still acceptable for impressive women. Fast Company is holding women to a lower standard of excellence and thus perpetuating the harmful myth that we need to lower the bar for women because – gosh darn it – if we hold women to the same standards of excellence as men, they just won’t be able to compete.

For the sake of argument I’ve curated the list, noting women whom I think would not be included were it not for this double standard. I’m aware of the sad truism that no one is more critical of women than other women, and I know that I may be guilty of this. To clarify, my goal in re-writing the list is not to denigrate the accomplishments of women who happen to be fashion models or have risen to power through the preceding power of men they were related to, but rather to highlight that we live in a world where the support and approval of men are still an important stepping stone for smart and capable women to succeed. These male connections and affirmations should beirrelevant.

How I would re-write theFast Company list:

1) No Nepotism: Women who gained their stature on the coat-tails of a male relative. No famous husbands, dads, or brothers.

1. Laili Ali (daughter of Mohamed Ali)
2. Cherie Blair (wife a former Prime Minister Tony Blair)
3. Hillary Clinton (I know some people will hate me for this but – wife of former President Clinton)
4. Abigail Disney (granddaughter of Walt Disney Company co-founder)
5. Melinda Gates (wife of Bill Gates)
6. Laura Pincus Hartman (sister of Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus)
7. Jennifer Newson Siebel (wife of former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom)
8. Jennifer Buffett (daughter-in-law of billionaire investor Warren Buffett)

2) No Pop Stars or Models: Women who gained pop culture status first and then parlayed it into doing good.

1. Maria Bello(actress)
2. Tory Burch(fashion designer)
3. Lily Cole(model)
4. America Ferrera(actress)
5. Liya Kebede(model)
6. Alicia Keys(pop singer)
7. Shakira(pop singer)
8. Christy Turlington (model)

3) No Corporate Employees: Women who are putting a compassionate face on multi-national corporations. Would we give special attention to people in these positions if they were men?

1. Susan Davis(Master Card Foundation)
2. Maria Eitel(Nike Foundation)
3. Carolyn Everson(Facebook)
4. Charlotte Oades(Coca Cola)
5. Dina Powell(Goldman Sachs Foundation)
6. Gabi Zedlmayer(Hewlett Packard)

Which still leaves a list of thirty-eight extraordinary women like Kathy Calvin, CEO of the United Nations Foundation, Dr.Helene Gayle, President and CEO of CARE U.S.A.,Tiffany Dufu, President of The White House Project, Noorjahan Akbar, who led a march through Kabul to protest the street harassment of women,Jessica Jackley, Cofounder of Kiva.org,andLeymah Gbowee, who… well…won the Nobel Peace Prize! (Fun fact: there were three winners in 2011 and they were all women.)

So no, there are no shortage of amazing women in the world. Media outlets likeFast Company just need to hold themselves to a high standard when identifying them.

Day two of the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit (together with the “Disruptive Publics” academic summit”) got off to a bit of slow start, as some of us waited at a hotel for a late shuttle. We finally decided simply to hike over ourselves (probably only 4 km or so but over rough road terrain that makes Cairo look like a pedestrian paradise). On the way we passed the road to the Ministry of Roads; the road was closed. It was not, however, a harbinger of the day to come, as the academics spoke productively and had a number of meaningful interactions with the Global Voices community, most poignantly at the end – more on that later.

I’m not sure the academics have quite as diverse a group as the larger GV community, but we still have a geographic and field mix that is much more diverse than most such gatherings. The 30-person “disruptive publics” group includes scholars from Ethiopia, Kenya, New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Slovenia, Turkey, Morocco, the Netherlands, Denmark. In the morning we went around the room to say one thing we think we know about digital media, which was a question that was interpreted somewhat differently depending on where you sat. I can’t recap them all but wanted to offer a smattering of ideas – Rob Faris of the Berkman Center (no relation, as we discussed in the hotel lobby on the first night) said that we should be focusing more on incremental changes rather than the big events that seem to constantly draw media attention. Tessa Houghtondrew our attention to the possibility that “chains of publics” may be created a “network of publics.” Nina Gr�nlykke Mollerup argued that “mediated & face to face communication are part of the same complex media sphere.” Marcus Michaelson argues that the Internet has allowed “new layers” of activists to get involved in politics. Tanya Notley pointed us to the increasing opacity of devices and platforms, and of the ways in which our data is being used. Melissa Tully argues that there is no such thing as a direct network effect, but we keep acting as if there are.

The academic round-table continued with some brief research presentations, of which I’d like to highlight a few (and let me say that I’ve got hours and hours of work to do updating our resources page after this conference). Enrique Armijo presented a disturbing picture of recent digital/mobile free speech issues in the United States, including the shutdown of the BART subway mobile network in advance of a planned protest (sound familiar, Egyptians?). Rob Faris detailed a number of Berkman projects, including one that uses word similarity analysis to map framing in the American and Russian blogospheres and traditional media. Interestingly, he concludes that in the U.S., broadcast media and the digital public sphere are largely talking about the same issues (if not always using precisely the same terminology) while in Russia the two spheres are engaged in entirely different issues and agendas. Christopher Wilson of the Engine Room laid out his organization’s plan to study how civil society organizations in 7 countries “relate to and use technology.” Again, I wish I could do this for everyone.

We also held a number of “breakout” sessions, including ones on censorship, online-offline interaction, generalizing from case studies and more. The notes on those are a bit spottier but I can get them to you if you’re interested. At the end of the day, the GV folks were kind enough to bring us together with the community and to allow us to introduce ourselves and our work. We then asked members of the Global Voices community to tell us the kinds of research questions they’d like to see taken up by academics. Nathan Mathias of the MIT Citizen Media Lab has actually put together a comprehensive list of those questions, and we’re working on crowdsourcing answers in the form of some of the research that does exist. A reporter for Central America pleaded with the crowd for more research on the region and decried the kind of work that goes on there. “People go and don’t speak the language and just read the other gringos in the country.” Another asked for an academic database that analyzes Global Voices content. There was a invitation for research about how authoritarian countries learn from one another about best censorship and filtering practices. Rebecca MacKinnon asked for comparative research about how states deal with hate speech – what works and what doesn’t. One participant wanted to know if there is research about how violent videos affect us. We were asked for information about how companies violate privacy and about particular data mining practices and their consequences. Jillian York asked if there is empirical research to support the common contention that bloggers are safer if they write in English rather than local languages. And one participant wondered if there is comparative research about the impact of digital diaspora communities. We were really overwhelmed (in a good way!) by the sheer volume, thoughtfulness and importance of these questions, again not all of which I can reproduce in this short post. Nathan Mathias (who has done amazing work taking notes on our sessions and who is also doing fascinating work as a grad student at MIT with Ethan Zuckerman) has taken the liberty of setting up an Etherpad page where we have all committed to linking to relevant research which answers some of these questions.

The Global Voices folks also let us sit in on some of their internal meetings, and since I only was able to get to one of them, I’m hoping some other academics might add comments about what went on in the comments here. One pertinent question pertained to transparency within the organization, with participants in one session pushing for GV to release an annual report. Other participants discussed issues of language, which have seemed to come up a lot – should authors write in local languages, and if so what should be the status of those posts, and how should they be handled in Lingua? The sense I get from these internal meetings is that GV has grown so fast and become so vital to so many people that folks are struggling with how to make sure that the organization remains as participatory, transparent and open as is possible given the magnitude and difficulty of the work they are doing. Also: they need more authors.

That’s all for today – Day 3 was kind of an off-day before the public summit, so I’ll try to update after the first day of that tomorrow.