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 [...]

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. [...]

by Mary Joyce In many universities, technology conferences, and blogs there is now an active debate about the role of digital technologies in the global fight for human rights, democracy, and social justice. A few people are strongly positive, a few are unflinchingly negative, but most are cautiously optimistic. Still, the question is debated: Can [...]

by Mary Joyce At last week’s Personal Democracy Forum, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine gave a keynote on their new book, The Networked Nonprofit. I’m often frustrated by how advice for nonprofits is vague (“listen more”) and tool-based (“Android or iPhone for your cause?”), so I was really glad to hear Beth and Allison’s overarching [...]

by Mary Joyce My friend Sem Devillart of the forecasting firm Popular Operations just sent me an interesting article by a staff member of the RAND Corporation, David Ronfeldt.  Written back in 1996, it is probably one of the first to sketch the political and social implications of the networked society made possible by digital [...]

One of the signs of a progress in a field of study is when you can take events and evaluate them against competing theories of the social universe. In current studies of digital activism, we are theorizing from cases, often without  bothering to check the historical record to see whether digital media can be credited [...]

by Mary Joyce On Thursday, President Obama gave a speech to a group of bank executives who collectively make up one of the world’s most powerful economic groups. He was there to scold them for the “failure of responsibility” that precipitated the financial crisis. That day was also Earth Day. Though scarcely recognized, it is [...]

by: Mary Joyce The Big Question Digital activism  is a field is search of a central question.   There are many possibilities being bandied about, and the nature of the question varies according to who is asking.  Activists ask “how do I use digital activism in my campaign?”, which too often devolves into “how do I [...]

by: David Faris Mary has, I think, gotten us off to a great start thinking about the substance of digital activism. Allow me to offer some thinking about this question, that uses examples or anecdotes to illustrate some theoretical thinking about what might be new about activism using digital technology, rather than reasoning directly from [...]