The wave of protests that swept through the Arab world last year – what we all call the “Arab Spring” – involved various methods of mobilization and communication of citizens that have since led to region-wide, progressive instances of revolutionary upheaval.  At MAP, we’ve of course been paying most attention to the use of digital [...]

I’m currently working on a book about the effect of the network on global political power dynamics, and one of my big questions is how networks affect nation states. In the past few years networks have had dramatic effects on nation states, both positive and negative.  As always, these effects are complex and contradictory.  Networks [...]

A crowd that’s always connected can never be dispersed.  It’s always still out there. So I am back from holiday break and finally read the Wired digital activism article with the vaguely sinister title: #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You by Bill Wasik. Wasik invented the flash mob by organizing strange and spontaneous [...]

During the 1960′s, when computers filled rooms or entire buildings, they were tools of academic computation and war.  Yet there was an alternative vision, exemplified in the Whole Earth Catalog, that information could be collected and disseminated by and for the people. In the 1970′s, as computers became more reliable, smaller, and (marginally) less expensive, [...]

Is the Internet a boon to capitalists or anarchists? Tyrants or dissidents? The powerful or the powerless? The short answer is “yes.” The Internet has made fortunes in e-commerce just as it aids hackers who wish to attack online storefronts (see Anonymous’s attack of Amazon.com in 2010).  The Internet makes it easier for oppressive governments [...]

Tonight Personal Democracy Media hosted a flash conference: From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street and Beyond: The Future of Networked Democracy.  Memes were disseminated.  One was the definition of an election as a “planned insurrection,” a phrase coin by the deathcore band Molotov Solution and improved upon by Clay Shirky.  Another was “the [...]

UPDATE: addition of Web Ecology Project research (Nov. 8, 2011) UPDATE: David Faris on the role of blogs in framing processes (Nov. 9, 2011) Since the Arab Spring began last December, both academics and amateurs have studied the effects of digital technology on the revolutions.   At this point there have been so many insights that [...]

UPDATE: MoveOn has posted a public FAQ that clarifies that they are not adding Occupy Wish List email addresses to their own list, but are merely using them to coordinate donations: http://occupywishlist.org/faq.html There was a time, not so long ago, when an organization or a group of activists could sit around a table and – [...]

In the Middle East, activists have used digital tools to bring about  dramatic political change under repressive regimes, so why has digital activism had such a lackluster effect in a democracy like the US? The Global Digital Activism Data Set (below) shows that the US has more instances of digital activism than any other country, [...]

Whether you agree with the rioters in London or not (I don’t, and I think it’s a colossal waste of time, a disruption of society, and unnecessarily destructive, but that’s just me… I also hated when my own beloved Red Sox fans ripped apart the Fenway area after the Sox won the ALCS in 2004), digital [...]