10

Oct

From the Tank Turret to Usenet: First International Case of Digital Activism?

“A copy of the letter Boris Yeltsin read from a tank turret in front of the Russian Parliament building was… entered into a computer, and forwarded across the network.” (image of anti-coup protesters: Wikipedia)

[UPDATED] In this age of pervasive social media, it’s easy to forget that digital activism precedes the world wide web. In 1991, activist geeks from the Soviet Union, the US, and Western Europe employedUsenetas an alternative form of mass mediato relay information about a coup attemptagainst Mikhail Gorbachev and protect the reform process.

Usenet, a forum-email hybrid, consisted of topical newsgroups of threaded comments. News of the coup was broadcast on the newsgrouptalk.politics.soviet, with information flowing through a Russian network called Relcom, theonly network to provide Russians a domestic andinternational internet connection.

Information was passed into, out of, and through Russia via Relcom’s Usenet service. This prevented the coup initiators – hardline Communists who opposed Gorbachev’s reforms – from creating an information black-out, which they attempted to create by censoring Russian TV broadcasts, taking radio stations off the air, blocking CNN, and even destroying the fax machines at publishing houses. Relcom was not shut down due to simple ignorance,said one newsgroup participant: “Thanks [sic.] Heaven, these cretins don’t consider usmass media!”

Commentators likeEthan Zuckermanof MIT’s Center for Civic Media have pointed out that during the Arab Springmedia ecologies were at work in disseminating information about the revolutions. It was not just social media or mobile phones or Al Jazeera, it was all of them working in concert.

Though much Russian media was shut down, a media ecology was also at work during the 1991 coup. Supporters in the West transmitted CNN and BBC broadcasts into Russia via Usenet. According to Larry Press,a Californian academic who participated in the information exchange and subsequently published accounts of the events,”pay phones were working in Moscow,and people in the streets could phone news in” to Demos, the programmers collective that founded Relcom and posted most of the Russian news on talk.politics.soviet during the coup attempt.

The coup occurred when bothSoviet head of state Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin were away from Moscow. In an odd twist, even after Yeltsin returned to Moscow, he had no access to mass media, and was forced to disseminate his declaration of opposition via paper flyers. The Usenet activists also helped to distribute his statements via talk.politics.soviet. According to Larry Press, “a copy of the letter Boris Yeltsin read from a tank turret in front of the Russian Parliament building was brought to Demos headquarters (a short trip), entered into a computer, and forwarded across the network.”

Founded only a year earlier, Relcom had surprising reach. At the time of the coup seventy Soviet cities “from Leningrad in theWest to Vladivostok in the East” had connections, according to Press. These connections were housed within a surprising variety of civil society organizations. Wrote Press later that year, “395 organizations were using it–universities, research institutes, stock and commodity exchanges,news services, high schools, politicians, and government agencies.” Relcom had a real capacity for national broadcast.

Despite attempts to keep the Russian people in the dark, information was able to spread enough that a group of unarmed Muscovites rallied around Yeltsin in the White House, which housed the legislature, and used trolley cars and street cleaning machines to block the tanks and military units descending on the building. Rather than launch a bloody attack in the middle of the capital, the coup leaders stepped down, Gorbachev retained his position, and the reforms continued. Less than six months later, the Soviet Union was dissolved.

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226 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Digital Activists/History of Digital Activism

30

Mar

How Big Data Entered American Politics

One of the major stories this election cycle has been “big data”: campaigns combining voter files, consumer records, and response data collected by their own volunteers to individually target voters. This practice is at once exciting because it allows campaigns greater precision than ever before in how they interact with individual voters, yet it also raises privacy concerns as citizens are often unaware of the amount of personal data available to third parties or how it is being used.

Right or wrong, big data is now a part of our political process. But how did it enter American politics in the first place? This history is recounted in Rasmus Kleis Nielsen’s new book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, which looks at how campaigns conduct field operations (door-to-door canvassing and phone-banking). Though these activities take place offline, computers are never far away, for it’s the analysis of digitized data that directs volunteers which doors to knock and which phones to call.

The Republicans Strike First

While consumer data has been used since the 1970′s to calculate credit scores and since the 1980‘s for direct marketing, political campaigns didn’t get into the digital data game until 1995, when the Republicans created the Voter Vault, a shared and continuously-updated voter file hosted on a server available to Republican state parties and campaigns.

This was quite an improvement over the previous data system. “In the absence of a shared voter file,” writes Nielsen, “every new campaign would have to start from scratch, building their own voter files by collecting public records on registered voters, buying commercial data to enhance it, and making identification calls.” After each campaign, “the entire painstakingly constructed database typically simply disappeared”.

The Democrats Slowly Respond

As soon as the Republicans had a shared voter file, the Democrats had to have one too, though their effort to create one was far bumpier. It was not until 2002 that the Democratic National Committee (DNC), under chairman Terry McAuliffe finally invested in their own system. The result, Demzilla, was distinctly underwhelming. In a 2003 article in Roll Call, one anonymous Democratic consultant complained that “the quality of data is far from a level that would make it immediately useful…. [and] the system is overly cumbersome.” It was hard to use and not worth the effort.

Also, many of the state parties did not even donate their data to the project, afraid that the system would be used more for the 2004 presidential race that for their local campaigns. (This perception was not helped by the fact Demzilla was part of Project 5104, McAuliffe’s campaign to win at least 51% of the presidential vote in 2004.) Notes the Roll Call article, “Demzilla is an idea on paper makes a lots of sense… the problem is that [the DNC] took the idea and let the technology run ahead of the relationships….”

Howard Dean to the Rescue

Howard Dean did not win the presidency in 2004, but he developed enough of a grassroots following that he was able to take the DNC chairmanship in 2005 against the wishes of party leaders. His two big projects were the 50 State Strategy to put DNC-salaried organizers in every state to help the local parties and to hit reset (almost like an Etch-a-Sketch…) on the party’s voter database.

This time the party’s electoral and technological projects complemented rather than undermined one another. While Project 5104 had sown distrust in the state parties, the 50 State Strategy increased it, making the parties more likely to contribute their data. As a result, the new database, VoteBuilder, grew quickly, and VoteBuilder achieved the same data participation in one year that Demzilla achieved in three. Demzilla was abandoned and VoteBuilder rose from the ashes. A single online interface, known as the VAN (Voter Activation Network) was added in 2007. Also, while Demzilla allowed 300 hundred data points to be added for each voter, VoteBuilder allowed 900, a recognition that more data was both available and useful for voter targeting.

Business to Politics: Mitt Romney Shows the Way

This realization about the usefulness of data was largely due the example set by Mitt Romney. In 2001 Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts and his consultant, Tom Gage, used data to “supersegment” voters as never before. Using sophisticated statistical techniques, he created predictive models which determined the probability of future voting behavior based on information about their past political and consumer habits. (Gage’s term eventually loss ground to the term “microtargeting,” possibly because of the divisive connotation of “segmenting”).

In his book, Neilsen quotes Gage as saying that the businessmen who were Romney’s advisers “were flabbergasted when they learned that such techniques, mainstays in many parts of corporate America, were not already widespread in politics.” However, Romney himself likely played a role as well in the centrality of data in his campaign.

In a recent articlein the New Yorker, Louis Menand points out that at Boston Consulting Group and Bain Capital, Romney’s employers from 1975 to 1999, “data crunching seems to have been the main engine of analysis.” Menand draws the link between Romney’s business background in management consulting and his pioneering role in bringing big data into American political campaigning. “Virtually everyone agrees that Romney was extremely good at” data crunching, writes Menand, “and he runs his political campaign in the same way.”

Obama Steals the Data Crown

Though the Republicans clearly got a head start on big data, Nielsen notes that in 2008, many observers believed that the Democrats took the lead. VoteBuilder and the VAN “were built by experienced vendors… and were subject to repeated field testing… before they faced the ultimate test during the general election of 2008″ notes Nielsen. “That year, many of my interviewees argue, the Democratic Party for the first time went one better than the Republican party in the targeting and data arms race.”

Coming Soon…. 2012: Clash of the Data Titans


420 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Digital Elections/History of Digital Activism

22

Dec

Star Wars: George Lucas’ Cold War Vision of the Digital World

The evil Darth Vader stands amid the broken and twisted bodies of his foes. He grabs a wounded Rebel Officer by the neck as an Imperial Officer rushes up to the Dark Lord.

IMPERIAL OFFICER: The Death Star plans are not in the main computer.

Vader squeezes the neck of the Rebel Officer, who struggles in vain.

VADER: Where are those transmissions you intercepted?

Vader lifts the Rebel off his feet by his throat.

VADER: What have you done with those plans?

REBEL OFFICER: We intercepted no transmissions. Aaah….This is a
consular ship. Were on a diplomatic mission.
[source]

George Lucas' Cold War vision saw computers primarily as tools of battle.

Star Wars: A New Hope is one of the greatest movies of all time and one of my personal favorites. So, in a departure from the usual content of this blog – and as an early Christmas present to MAP readers – here is an analysis of the digital vision of Star Wars.

Not only is Star Wars a great work of science fiction, it is a great work of computer science fiction. (The word “computer” appears 48 times in the screenplay, “Jedi” only 19). The digital world of Star War is deeply shaped by the computer science of the early 70′s. This is not surprising, since George Lucas wrote his screenplay at that time in California, a part of the world buzzing with early computer research. In the 1970′s, computers were expensive Cold War command-and-control devices funded by the military, not the personal and social tools we know today. This 1970′s vision of the computer is what we see in Star Wars.

This command-and-control conception of computing is necessary to Lucas’s plot and the difficulty of digital content transmission forms the dramatic tension of the film. The plot revolves around a set of stolen digital plans for the Imperial Death Star, which are ferried across the galaxy to the Rebels by Luke Skywalker in the hard-drive of a robot called Artoo. Darth Vader and the forces of the Empire are hot on their trail, trying to apprehend them and retrieve the plans.

If email existed, the movie’s plot would evaporate. Imagine the scene above, if email existed in the world of Star Wars:

IMPERIAL OFFICER: The Death Star plans are not in the main computer.

VADER: Where are those transmissions you intercepted? What have you done with those plans?

REBEL OFFICER: The moment we received the plans we emailed them immediately to the top Rebel commanders. They are already reviewing them to launch an attack on the Death Star. It’s already too late!

VADER: Well, crap!

The absence of email in the world of Star Wars is an artistic choice by Lucas. If the digital plans could be “transmitted” to Princess Leia’s ship (where the above scene occurs), then why couldn’t they be transmitted by the same means directly to the rebel leaders? They could, of course, but the film’s audience did not know that computers could do that. Though email did exist, the Internet at the time was a military-owned research network, and ordinary Americans did not know email or a computer-based communication networks existed. So the idea that plans could be transmitted one time and then needed to by carried across the galaxy on a physical disk inside a robot was a credible proposition.

Computers have a role in Star Wars beyond the central drama of the plot. Computers enter the action in ways large and small. In the world of Star Wars, however, they are command-and-control devices used in the operation of complex industrial and military machinery. Lucas has a Cold War vision of computing.

A computer runs the complex agricultural machines on Luke’s home planet of Tatooine:

Uncle Owen: What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.

A computer helps Han Solo navigate his ship, the Millennium Falcon:

Obi Wan Kenobi: How long before you can make the jump to light speed?

Han: It’ll take a few moments to get the coordinates from the navi-computer.

The ship begins to rock violently as lasers hit it.

Luke: Are you kidding? At the rate they’re gaining…

Han: Traveling through hyperspace isn’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?

Computers also help Luke and Han fight spaceship-to-spaceship through a neat 3D targeting interface on their laser cannons (this would be a Cold Warrior’s wet dream). A targeting computer is also used by the pilots when they attack the Death Star at the end of the movie (though Luke ultimately relies on the intuitive power of the Force over the computer).

Again, this is a fairly old-fashioned vision of the future of computing. Targeting was the technology that first got the American military into the business of funding computer research during WWII, when the military realized computers could be useful in calculating trajectories for firing missiles at fast-moving aircraft.

A single computer system also runs the Death Star itself. This computer is a little different, because it is part of a network – yes, like the Internet! In the middle of the movie, Luke and his friends are captured on the Death Star and one of the robots accesses its computer:

THREEPIO: We found the computer outlet, sir.

Ben feeds some information into the computer and a map of the city appears on the monitor. He begins to inspect it carefully. Threepio and Artoo look over the control panel. Artoo finds something that makes him whistle wildly.

BEN: Plug in. He should be able to interpret the entire Imperial computer network.

Artoo punches his claw arm into the computer socket and the vast Imperial brain network comes to life, feeding information to the little robot. After a few moments, he beeps something.

THREEPIO: He says he’s found the main computer to power the tractor beam that’s holding the ship here. He’ll try to make the precise location appear on the monitor.

Again this is a classic Cold War view of the Internet. In the 1970′s Vint Cerf, the Father of the Internet, was a scientist at DARPA, the Pentagon-funded research center that built the Internet. In a 2010 talk, Cerf described DARPA’s vision in building the Internet: “DARPA was looking for ways to build command-and-control systems that had no central structure, and were highly distributed, and that could be readily reconstituted.” A computer network that could run a huge military facility like the Death Star was very much what the Pentagon had in mind when they funded research on computer networking.

George Lucas and the Pentagon shared the same vision of the value of computing: better war machines. Today computers are certainly used by the military, but the most transformative use of computers is not targeting technology, but the Internet, another Pentagon-funded computer research project that received relatively little attention during its development in the 1960′s, 70′s, and 80′s.

Targeting systems, military aircraft navigation, a command-and-control network for a military facility: this was the Cold War vision of computing in the 1970′s, but it wasn’t the only vision. At the same time counter-culture technologists envisioned computers in the way they act today: as personal devices for individual expression and creativity. In his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, philosopher of technology Ted Nelson wrote:

Somehow the idea is abroad that computer activities are uncreative…. This is categorically false. Computers involve imagination and creation at the highest level. Computers are an involvement you can really get into, regardless of your trip or your karma…. COMPUTERS BELONG TO ALL HUMAN KIND.

This touchy-feely personal vision of computers is diametrically opposed to Lucas’ military vision, but it was a more accurate prediction of what computers became.(Ironically, Lucas embraced the intuitive and metaphysical worldview of the counterculture in the idea of the “Force,” created by all living things and used by the Jedi. Yet in his conception the Force and the computer are in opposition to one another. This is why Luke turns off his targeting computer and instead relies on the Force to guide him during the film’s climax.)

In the end, George Lucas got it wrong. The Cold War vision of computing was more a function of the prejudices and priorities of than period than the actual capacities of the computer. He would never guess that one day the Force would run through the Internet.

518 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

History of Digital Activism/Just for Fun

21

Dec

Eternally Contested Internet: The 1980′s

A Moment of Collaboration

The overarching theme of this series on the history – and pre-history – of the Internet is conflict: different actors with different goals and visions shaping the medium. The 1960′s saw a tension between the Cold War and the counter-culture. The 1970′s saw the rise of commercial firms since advances in processing power meant that mass-produced “microcomputers” (desktops) could be sold to businesses, rather than a few hugely expensive machines going to universities and the government.

The 1980′s broke this pattern of conflict. It was a rare moment when a single vision – adoption of the values of openness and collaboration for the common good – were unquestionably at the fore. It was in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s that the technical and ideological foundation of the Internet – which began in the high-tech Silicon Valley / high-karma San Francisco milieu of the Bay Area in the 1960′s – were finally “baked in.”

The Internet Learns a Single Free Language

The first critical development was that a software for computer networking and data transfer was developed using government funding and was thus free to use by any hardware or software designer. It was called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) and was extremely robust. In fact, it is extremely robust: Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), first defined in 1980, is still running the Internet today. That TCP/IP became the dominant communication protocol of the Internet meant thatthe Internet was born as a public entity rather than a commercial one.

In the late 70′s and early 80′s there were already a small number of computer networks – local area networks (LANs) – that existed in offices or university. The problem was that they all used different languages to talk to one another. Without a common language, it would be impossible to connect the networks to one another and create the “internetwork” that became the Internet.

In 1976 Vint Cerf, now Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, went to work for DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, the Defense Department project that began the global Internet. DARPA’s vision was still a Cold War one. As Cerf described in 2010, “DARPA was looking for ways to build command-and-control systems that had no central structure, and were highly distributed, and that could be readily reconstituted.” This meant that networks needed to be connected to one another so that there would be multiple paths from any computer to another. Isolated networks had limited value. They were connected, but only within a single institution.

As a result, Cerf and Robert Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP and also a scientist at DARPA, began encouraging university LANs to connect to ARPANET, the DARPA computer network that formed the core of the modern Internet. In his book Net Effect, Thomas Streeter explains how Cerf and Kahn used free TCP/IP software – and the desire to connect – as incentives to turn isolated networks into a larger internetworked Internet:

The goal, moreover, was not to be secretive and exclusive. In 1980, when ARPANET’s Vint Cerf met with a group of computer science professors from across the country, he offered to connect the ARPANET to a proposed research network if it adopted TCP/IP protocols. This set the trend towards encouraging open access to the internet, which would become the informal policy throughout the 1980′s….

The Military Gives up Control of the Internet

The first amazing development of the 1980′s was the rise of free software for connecting to and transferring data across the Internet. The second amazing development was that the Internet lost its military character and became a civilian network. In 1983 ARPANET was split into a military and civilian Internet. The civilian Internet moved out of the Department of Defense and into the ownership of the research-focused National Science Foundation. It was the beginning of the Internet that we know today.

Why Did the Government Geeks Beat Out the Capitalists and Cold Warriors?

Why was this able to occur? Why didn’t the military fight for control of the Internet or businesses challenge TCP/IP with proprietary protocols that would have forever fragmented the Internet? One reason is that both the military and commercial firms were distracted. DARPA’s high-profile computing project at the time was Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI), a $1 billion artificial intelligence initiative meant to push back against Japan’s advances in the field.

Commercial firms were still focused on selling individual computers. “The U.S. mainstream,” writes Streeter, “was romancing the entrepreneurial tale of stand-alone microcomputers in the 1980′s.” Since the “Internet” of the time was a research network with few applications composed of unconnected LANs at a few firms and universities and a military-owned ARPANET, one can forgive them for not seeing the commercial value in it.

Firms did build their own proprietary Internet protocol software, like Xerox’s XNS and Apple’s AppleTalk, but this software failed to gain market share because TCP/IP was 1) free 2) worked really well and 3) was first to market because it was the protocol of the ARPANET. Because the deck was already stacked against them, commercial firms were convinced to adopt TCP/IP by the end of the 1980′s.

Unsung Heros

Despite these contextual factors, it would be unfair to diminish the efforts of individuals to build the open Internet we know today. Most of the men (yes, by far men) who opened the Internet to the public are unknown. Let’s look at some of the key players.

Whereas we now associate the military establishment with secrecy and aggressive isolation, the Pentagon point person for ARPANET was Barry Leiner, a man who, like Kahn and Cerf, convinced many private companies to adopt TCP/IP. His time working in think tanks, private industry and the government made him an excellent bridge-builder and his achievement in encouraging the adoption of TCP/IP was equivalent to “persuading the peoples of the world to stop speaking English, French, Russian or Chinese and instead invent and adopt a new language that works even better and allows everyone to communicate with one another.” It was his close relationship with Steve Wolff of the National Science Foundation that allowed for that smooth transition of the Internet into the civilian sphere. Wolff, who got an electrical engineering degree from Swarthmore, was perfectly positioned to bridge the worlds of academic research and high tech.

The Director of DARPA in the early 1980′s, Robert Cooper, was also more interested in building knowledge than achieving military goals. In a 1993 interview he described his criterion for success of a DARPA project:

There were two criteria… one objective I had in the basic research area was to expand the support mainly to graduate students in computer sciences at the key universities… The other criterion for success… was whether some of these ideas… actually got into military systems, and I don’t think the jury is in on how much of that occurred….

This dedication often took dramatic turns, as this anecdote about Vint Cerf indicates. Cerf is a sharp dresser whose frequent attire is a three-piece suit:

At a 1992 meeting that marked a pivotal juncture for the Internet Protocol, engineers were at one another’s throats over a controversial issue. Dr. Cerf took the podium and… proceeded to strip…. He stopped when he reached a T-shirt emblazoned with “I P on Everything,” an inside joke referring to the ubiquity of the Internet Protocol. The audience, he said, “went nuts,” and the tension dissolved. One member of the audience rushed to the podium and placed a $5 bill in Dr. Cerf’s waistband.

There are a few moments in history where the right mix of contextual factors and individual ability come together to take an action with a dramatic positive impact on global human history. In the history of the Internet, the 1980′s was such a period. It was a moment when the right people were in the right positions and something incredibly unlikely, and incredibly good for humankind, occurred.

519 days ago Short URL Comments

History of Digital Activism

17

Dec

Eternally Contested Internet: The 1970′s

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, a new potential consumer joined the computer market: the American corporation. The computer was not only useful to universities for carrying out complex computations, or to governments wishing to shoot Soviet bombers out of the skies, but also to companies wishing to increase workplace efficiency. In his book,Net Effect, sociologist Thomas Streeter describes these four competing visions of the computer’s value:

While the corporate community was struggling with the floundering effort to implement Taylorized “offices of the future” [and] the military was imagining global command-and-control systems with the ARPANET, and descendants of [researcher and inventor Douglas] Engelbart were exploring the encyclopedic vision of computing … a community [was] promulgating a distinctive countercultural vision of computers as creative writing machines that enabled self-exploration and self expression.

In the 1960s, the Bay Area was the center of American hippie-dom (thanks to the vibrant counterculture scene in San Francisco) and a center of technological innovation (thanks to the tech businesses nurtured by Stanford University). This strange juxtaposition of high-tech and high-karma led to an unexpected technological elite: flower children as computer engineers. The idea of a computer as an elite machine for efficiency or military advantage did not appeal to their values, which were anti-war, anti-establishment, and pro-personal expression. Even the programmers working on ARPANET, the Internet precursor funded by the Department of Defense, wore sneakers and peace pins to briefings at the Pentagon.

In his influential 1974 book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, successful technology philosopher and failed entrepreneur Ted Nelson described the desire to redefine the computer:

Somehow the idea is abroad that computer activities are uncreative…. This is categorically false. Computers involve imagination and creation at the highest level. Computers are an involvement you can really get into, regardless of your trip or your karma…. COMPUTERS BELONG TO ALL HUMAN KIND.

bean-bag room at Xerox's PARC research center, 1972

This idea of computers being creative, being for everyone, ran against the logic of companies like IBM and Xerox. Engineers were free to hang out in the “bean-bag room” of Xerox’s Palo Alto research center, but they were focused on creating machines for the business market. A 1975 article in Business Week explains the corporate vision of “minicomputers” (desktop units):

Word processing is the focal point today for competition in the upcoming office-of-the-future market…. Two years ago, [Xerox] Chairman C. Peter McColough… said: “In the next decade, if we are to generate real efficiencies in the office, we’re going to have to alter traditional structures. The idea of one secretary for one executive is no longer efficient or economical. And we have to reduce and reposition the role of paper.”

engineer playing Spacewar at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, 1972

While technology manufacturers were thinking in the practical terms of the office – document creation, secretaries, paper usage – an entirely different culture was forming among hobbyists. In a 1972 article for Rolling Stone, entitled “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,”Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand described a primitive computer game called Spacewar, created by a new type of computer engineer, the “hacker” (“A true hacker is not a group person. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship…”). In the article, Brand explains the need for broader access to computers to reveal their creative potential:

Until computers come to the people we will have no real idea of their most natural functions. Up to the present their cost and size has kept them in the province of rich and powerful institutions, who, understandably, have developed them primarily as bookkeeping, sorting and control devices…. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over…. That might enhance things … like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction….

In the vision of Business Week, smaller computers were an opportunity to increase profits and provide office efficiencies. In the vision of Rolling Stone, smaller computers were an opportunity to hack – to express one’s self, to be creative, to have passionately unproductive fun.

Both sides won. While the social media world of today is far more a place of “the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction” than of office efficiency (just ask the cubicle drone on Facebook), the social media world is owned by corporations. Ted Nelson’s imagined world of “imagination and creation at the highest level” is big business for Apple, Flickr (Yahoo), and YouTube (Google). Both sides won… and so the contest continues.

 

524 days ago Short URL Comments

Digital Activism and Power/History of Digital Activism

15

Dec

Eternally Contested Internet: The 1960′s

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 to track and control public political speech, just as it has created spaces wherepublic political speech is easier to create than ever before (see China’s weibo microblogging services). While the Internet allows anyone with access to an Internet connection the ability to upload a YouTube video or create a blog or Facebook page for free, those services are owned by private corporations with market valuations in the billions. Your self expression is their pay-day.

We should not be surprised that today’s Internet is contradictory; it always has been. In fact, this contestation over the meaning of the Internet even precedes the Internet itself. As an illustration, let’s go back to the 1960′s, an era of contestation if ever there was one. On the one hand it was an era of unprecedented challenge to authority. Movements for gay rights, civil rights, and women’s liberation surged in the US and thirty-three African countries gained independence. It was also a time of great violence and repression. It was the height of the Cold War, a decade that began with the Bay of Pigs invasion (a moment when the Cold War almost got Hot) and included a vicious proxy war in Vietnam, the suppression of the Prague Spring, and the violent Cultural Revolution in China, in which at least a million people were killed.

SAGE equipment at the Computer History Museum

In this decade two precursors to the Internet emerged. The first was SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), a huge and hugely-expensive government-funded MIT and IBM-built compute, which connected radar tracking stations for the purpose of identifying and firing upon Soviet bombers in US airspace. Though the first SAGE Division became operational in 1959, by 1963 there were 22 Sector Direction Centers across the country, which collected radar data, transmitted digitally through telephone modems. At each center an operator could read radar data on a yellow terminal screen (see left) and then give commands as to whether to engage with targets (the final human decision is what made the system “semi-automatic”).

This vision of the Internet was non-generative (computers built for a single function), controlled by elites (government, corporations, top universities), not accessible to or designed for public use, and tremendously expensive. The basic Internet structure provided by the telephone modems was part of a secret government project and was a weapon of war. Each SAGE computer weighed 300 tons and filled a four-story building. The entire project cost approximately $10 billion dollars. There is debate as to whether the system was ever functional and, in any case, it never shot down a single Soviet bomber.

cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog

In 1968 an entirely different vision of the Internet was born, this time on paper. It was the Whole Earth Catalog. Its creator, Stewart Brand was – not to put too fine a point on it – a hippie. He was a friend of Ken Kesey‘s, was profiled in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and originally envisioned the catalog as a resource for people living in the back-to-the-land commune movement. (The catalog includes sections like “Shelter and Land Use” and “Industry and Craft”.)

Yet there was a greater goal. J. Baldwin, one of the the catalog’s editors, remembers Brand’s vision: “I want to make this thing called a ‘whole Earth’ catalog so that anyone on Earth can pick up a telephone and find out the complete information on anything.” As Steve Jobs pointed out forty years later, “it was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.” The last WEC was published in 1998, when the Internet made it obsolete by serving the same purpose more efficiently.

Where SAGE was narrow and non-generative, the WEC was full of user-generated content. Informed individuals were paid $10 to review a product and the writing style was friendly and personal, like a blog post. Where SAGE was a private endeavor that enriched a private company, IBM, the WEC was not designed to make money. The catalog did not sell the products it listed, but rather provided listings of reliable vendors. Where SAGE was not designed for public use, WEC was designed specifically to make the world’s information accessible to ordinary people – even if they were living out on a commune. And it was not only made for ordinary (free-thinking, quirky, iconoclastic) people, it was made with them. A page from a 1969 catalog notes, “If the supplier gives you poor service, please let us know. That information can be added to his review.” WEC was apparently also a predecessor of Yelp.

Though the Internet of today looks a lot more like the Whole Earth Catalog than like SAGE, it is still being contested, right now through SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which aims to stop the online distribution of pirated media by making it easier to shut down sites that distribute it. More worryingly, SOPA also makes Internet service providers and social media platforms liable for pirated content shared on their platform, in effect encouraging them to pro-actively censor content the way China social media platforms already do. (Read more about the implications of SOPA here, from Rebecca MacKinnon and Ivan Sigal).

Is the Internet a boon to capitalists or anarchists? Corporations or individuals? Producers or consumers? The answer is still being contested.

 

525 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Digital Activism and Power/History of Digital Activism

08

Nov

Arab Spring: What Did We Learn About Tech and Revolution?

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 what is needed is a good curated aggregation of the best answers to the question: What effect did digital technology and social media have on the Arab Spring?

The purpose of this post is to serve as a dynamic compendium of the best answers to this question, and I hope to update it frequently as new insights are gained. Here is what I’ve come up with so far.

Step 1 – In the Beginning: a Safe(r) Space to Reveal Preferences

In a recent post on Gigaom, Mathew Ingram quotes open data advocate Aaron Swartz‘s quick and dirty summary of Jon Elster‘s theory of the steps of a revolution:

  • A core group of committed activists get together to “do something completely crazy.”
  • The government cracks down, and this behavior makes people who are sympathetic to the cause “rally to the support of the crazy ones.”
  • As the protests continue and it looks as though they might have some tangible effect, at some point “it seems worth it even for just normal reasonable people to start joining in.”
  • Eventually, the protests become so large that “even their opponents pretend to be part of them, so as not to be on the wrong side of history.”

Yet even before activists get together “to do something completely crazy” they need to simply get together. The Internet provides a safer space than offline for potential activists to meet and honestly share views.

Yes, it is true that repressive governments are getting increasingly savvy about this function of the Internet and are more actively tracking opposition activities online. Yet activists are becoming savvier too, such that identifying a digital activist who is truly skilled in anonymity is quite difficult to identify (witness the successful evasions of the hackers of Anonymous). At the same time, many governments lack the resources or understanding necessary to conduct thorough surveillance of the online activities of potential opponents, so simply being online may provide meaningful cover, even in the absence of sophisticated anonymity techniques.

This means that the Internet can help strengthen a nascent opposition movement by giving passionate individual opponents of a regime a place to meet one another, share and develop their views by revealing preferences, and build a collective identity that will make opposition to the government – and membership in the activist group – and ever stronger motivator of their behavior. (For more on like-minded groups and intensification of ideology see here.) This period of mutual sharing of discontent can last for years before different contextual factors align (changes in opportunity structure) and the time for mobilization is ripe.

At this point, the revolution has not even begun. The activists have not planned or executed any action. They are just talking to one another by using technologies like forums, blogs and social networks. If the government is relatively ignorant of how activist use the Internet, citizens can have these discussions on the public web, as Egyptian political bloggers did in 2004-2005. (The development of the quasi-political group Anonymous on the imageboard 4chan is another example of this phenomenon.) If the government is savvy, more sophisticated tools for anonymity will be necessary.

In a recent talk in Beirut, Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill noted that repressive governments prevent revolution by creating collective action problems for their citizens, specifically high individual cost of failure (torture, prison) and high cost of organization (difficult to meet, communicate).

The Internet can help citizens solve the first collective action problem of living in a repressive regime: the inability to communicate with others who share their feelings of opposition. This step actually involves two functions:

  1. The capacity to reveal ones’ preferences to others and
  2. The capacity to communicate with others who share that preference

Social platforms like blogs, forums, and social networks are very effective places to reveal preferences to others. While it is easier to maintain anonymity in a forum or chat room that on a social network, where social connections can be used to reveal identity, all three provide an opportunity for citizens to mutually share their frustration with the regime, either explicitly or in coded/indirect language. Because these platforms allow for many-to-many communication, it is possible to have mutual statements of preference. It’s not just one person standing on a digital soapbox and shouting into the darkness, it’s the capacity for others to respond, “me too!”

The Boston Review recently published an interview with Ahmed Saleh and Nadine Wahab, two administrators of the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said. The page was a key meeting point (and then mobilizing point) for the young urban middle class before and during the Egyptian Revolution. It is named for Khaled Said, a young man beaten to death by police in June of 2010. Saleh describes how the page served as a freer meeting place for politically aware Egyptian youth:

The youths in Egypt, pre-revolution, lived two lives, one online and one off-line. The off-line life is very limited in access to information, freedom of speech and mobilization, and even in access to each other. For decades, it was illegal for five people to gather for any reason (per emergency law), although it was tolerated except when it was politically motivated. Online political activists used terms like “group,” “room,” and “comment” as if they had physical meanings.

Nadine Wahab, another page admin, concurs:

Since the Egyptian government had made the brick-and-mortar world so unfriendly to free expression and the Internet was so readily available to just tweet, update Facebook, or send a quick blog post, it became the space to express your thoughts or post a news item.

The page also was a place to reveal preferences about a different future for Egypt, all while protecting themselves through the use of false names. Saleh continues:

The Internet offered an open environment that politicized the youths, allowed them to raise awareness on possibilities of shaping their future, diversified their perspectives, anonymized their identities, gave them the taste of free speech, and pushed them to see through the regime propaganda and despise it.

Wahab explains how the admins explicitly attempted to use the Facebook page to create a public debate about the Mubarak regime, to create a readiness for mobilization against the regime (ie, framing processes):

As the people posted live, people would react live and a conversation developed. I believe 2010 was a tipping point for this interaction; we went from conversation to a public debate, and just not with activists but with a larger, less engaged tech-savvy population. Administrators were very deliberate in cultivating a relationship with this population.

David Faris of Roosevelt University, who is writing a book on digital activism Egypt, confirms the importance of digital tools in framing processes and also highlights the importance of blogs, particularly in using torture as an issue with which to challenge the legitimacy of the Mubarak regime.

Digital is indeed wonderful for framing processes, but taking the long view, what made Khaled Said possible in the first place were past attempts (largely digital with offline connections) to make torture part of the public sphere, and to introduce the tortured as claims-makers in Egyptian politics. So efforts like Torture in Egypt and Misr Digital were critical stage-setting efforts, made possible by digital tools, that transformed the discursive environment around torture long before [Khaled Said admin] Wael Ghonim ever set foot on the political stage.

This raising or awareness (and creation of collective identity around that awareness) was key in creating a group of people ready to be mobilized when the right moment hit. As research provided later reveals, people using a Facebook were among the first to turn up at the demonstrations in Tahrir Square. Though there were other factors in place, the key opening was the successful revolution in Tunisia, which showed that dramatic change was possible.

Step 2 – Solving the Next Collective Action Problem: Collaborative Planning

Once a group of people are known to one another and have mutually revealed their preference for political change, it will not be too long before someone suggests that they do something about it. This will involve a more involved form of collective action than collective identity development and group formation. Activists will now need to jointly identify and analyze contextual factor (political, social, economic) that will determine whether and how they can act. They will need to develop, delegate, and track tasks. They will need to develop a plan.

Fortunately, the Internet provides a plethora of tools for collaboration. Some technologies like mobile SMS, instant messaging, Skype, and email, can be used with the highest protection of anonymity by using various types of encryption. More public tools, where anonymity is guarded by using a false name and accessing the platform via a circumvention tool like Tor, can also be used in this stage.

However, while actions can be planned on a public platform like Facebook (and were in the case of the We Are All Khaled Said page), detailed campaign planning is best suited to the careful work of a small group, where coordination is easier, meaning SMS, IM, Skype, and email may be safer and more useful. From his base in Dubai, Wael Ghonim, the most famed admin of the We are All Khaled Said group, used GChat to communicate with other activists back in Egypt. There are also a variety of more specialized technologies like fundraising widgets and wikis and Google Docs that can be useful for aggregating information and jointly creating a plan.

Unfortunately, because these activities take place through private platforms like email and SMS – rather than public platforms like Facebook and Twitter – it is often hard to find examples of how technologies were used in collaboration without asking activists themselves.

Step 3 – Going Public and Getting Big: Mobilization, Information Cascades, and Media Narratives

Digital technology has been used in many ways to facilitate political change, and the revolution is not public yet. It is only now that the first step of Elster’s model occurs. Having used digital technology to mutually identify other people unhappy with the regime and to collaborative create a plan of action, now that core group of committed activists can get together to “do something completely crazy.”

At this stage the Internet and mobile phones become useful for spreading information to a broad public. This information can range from mobilizing calls to action (“go to Tahrir tomorrow!”) to anti-regime preferences (“Mubarak out!” “proud to be an Egyptian #jan25″). The Khaled Said Facebook page was used to mobilize the first wave of protesters, although many groups that were mobilized existed before and outside of the realm of digital activism. Ahmed Saleh explains:

If it weren’t for Facebook, the Egyptian revolution would have started anyway. The effect of a Facebook call to a timed revolution with a large outreach (that activated an organized political activist community that’s been in the making for decades) is making the revolution shorter, more organized, with fewer casualties and more theatrical.

Saleh also describes how quickly information spread and how quickly other activists began self-organizing, such that Facebook became less important:

Additionally it is my claim that in the afternoon of January 25, 2011 when the masses came out, the Internet and Facebook became irrelevant. In fact all of the administrators of the Facebook pages and even the political activists were surprised that the demonstrators continued protesting all over Egypt on January 26 and beyond, without any Facebook page calling for it or organizing it. The administrators were now on the receiving end of the news.

It is here that the important function of information cascades comes into play, which means that people observe the actions of others and, as a result, make a choice to undertake the same action. The classic example is the protests in East Germany that led to German reunification. (This case is described by Susann Lohmann in greater detail in this 1994 paper.) From a summary on Wikipedia:

Small protests began in Leipzig, Germany in 1989 with just a handful of activists challenging the German Democratic Republic. For almost a year, protesters met every Monday growing by a few people each time. By the time the government attempted to address it in September 1989, it was too big to quash. In October, the number of protesters reached 100,000 and by the first Monday in November, over 400,000 people marched the streets of Leipzig. Two days later the Berlin Wall was dismantled.

In this example, the mechanism of the information cascade was that citizens physically saw the protesters out in the streets. Each Monday the presence of the protesters made political change seem more possible and each Monday a few more people became convinced that if they joined it would make a difference. While in the beginning only the hardcore of activists were convinced, by the end large swaths of the population saw the end of a divided Germany as inevitable. The same occurred with the street protests in Tunisia and Egypt, though not only because citizens saw the protests in real life, but also through various forms of media.

In the Internet age, information cascades are networked and include multiple media types, jumping between citizens, traditional media outlets, and back again. In the case of Tunisia, activists used Facebook and sneakernets to transmit video of the Sidi Bouzid protests (and subsequent government crack-down) to international TV broadcasters like Al Jazeera, which have a much larger audience than any Facebook page. Al Jazeera reporters had been barred from entering Tunisia and they were eager to find a way to work around the blocks by using citizen media. Viewing these protests on TV – and hearing about them on the radio – was the mechanism by which many Tunisians learned about them and made the decision to start protesting in other cities. (Ethan Zuckerman also has a nice video describing Tunisian media protest dynamics).

Recent survey-based research analyzed by Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson and collected by Alix Dunn of The Engine Room has also shown that, as many surmised, Facebook was very important in bringing protesters to Tahrir Square on the first day of the Egyptian protests, before there was any revolution for the international media to report on. First-day protesters were also likely to use Twitter, another means of mobilizing supporters, though the overall use of Twitter was low among protesters in general and miniscule in the Egyptian population.

During the Arab Spring, social media information cascades had both a local and international function. For example, it could be argued that the primary value of Twitter was not as a tool for local mobilization but as a mechanism of international contagion and agenda-setting. From early on in their revolution, Tunisian activists used the Twitter hashtag #sidibouzid as a way to aggregate information about what was going on in their country and broadcast it to the world. During the Egyptian revolution, people across the world followed the #jan25 hashtag to get the most recent information on what was happening when international media outlets lacked the resources or insight to provide that information. Every country involved in the Arab Spring had an associated hashtag, either a specialized hashtag like #feb14, the revolutionary hashtag for Bahrain, or simply the name of country.

The exact mechanics of informatoin cascades also differed from revolution to revolution. Research on Twitter activity during the Arab Spring by the Web Ecology Project, a volunteer research collective not dissimilar from the Meta-Activism Project, revealed that:

In the case of Egypt, lots of information flows start from journalists, bloggers and activists, with bots as a lesser, but important, influence. In Tunisia, there were fewer flows started by journalists, more by bots and bloggers, and way fewer from activists. This may reflect the fact that the Tunisian story caught many journalists and activists by surprise – they were late to the story, and less significant as information sources than the bloggers who cover that space over time. By the time Egypt becomes a story, journalists realized the significance and were on the ground, providing original content on Twitter, as well as to their papers.

The fact that citizens could record their own content and share it with sympathetic international broadcasters like Al Jazeera also meant that they could control the narrative of their revolution as never before. And, if they lacked a sympathetic broadcaster in the mainstream media, they could just broadcast themselves internationally, by dropping the Twitter hashtag of their revolution into their tweets to gain the attention of an international audience. In this way, no individual activist had to build an individual following. They just had to attach their own content to an already popular hashtag to gain the attention of the world.

In our current media environment, information can enter the media system through an increasing number of entry points. This makes it much more likely that important information will spread broadly within the population for whom it is important (from local to global) and makes it much harder to maintain information vacuums. Even in places where the international media is forbidden, a single memory card with video of a protest can make its way onto the Internet or out of the country in an activist’s back pocket.

Conclusion: a Catch-22 for Repressive Regimes

Going back to Elster’s timeline of revolution from the beginning of this post, we can now see that Elster’s first step (activists doing “something crazy” in public) is actually the end of a long process of group formation and planning that is less visible. This may be why governments in Tunisia and Egypt were unsuccessful in beating back the revolutions. Once the revolutions were visible it was already too late.

Repressive regimes need to nip digital activism in the bud if they are to prevent digitally-facilitated revolution. But this is a catch-22 for repressive regimes. “Nipping digital activism in the bud” means controlling and punishing behavior that is not an explicit act of rebellion, like sharing a news story about government corruption or talking about political change in another country, both part of step 1. When governments control this speech they end up controlling the speech of more people, as not only hard-core activists but also mostly apolitical citizens might wish to discuss these topics. This means that they are creating resentment against the government by citizens who were not previously politically engaged. This may be what is happening in China.

Also, it is important to note that digital technology was not used as effectively in all the revolutions of the Arab Spring. Even when digital technology was used, as in the cases of Syria and Bahrain, much stronger contextual forces (a government willing to violently repress and Saudi support of the government, respectively) may have overwhelmed the positive effects of digital technology. In other cases, like Libya, low Internet penetration and significant blocking meant that digital technology played a limited role, though some international broadcast was still possible using citizen media (see Andy Carvin’s talk on citizen media in the Libyan revolution).

Please let me know in the comments if you agree with this analysis of the role of digital technology in the Arab Spring and if you have evidence that supports or contradicts it.

 

562 days ago Short URL 4 Comments

Digital Activism and Power/Digital Repression/History of Digital Activism

01

Sep

The Proof is in the Pendulum: a History of Digital Activism and Repression

Purist arguments of cyber-optimism and cyber-pessimism are becoming increasingly irrelevant as evidence of digital technology’s ability to both empower and repress accumulates. However, what is the basis of this argument beyond anecdotalism of a slightly broader scope?

I would argue that in the past five year we have witnessed a pendulum swing from activist advantage to government revanche to dense tactical contention between the two. According to the initial findings of the Global Digital Activism Data Set, digital activism (cases of digital technology use to achieve social or political change) did not really take off until the second half of the first decade of this millennium. Though there were a few politically-themed BBS forums in the 1980′s, the graph below shows that that the first real emergence correlates to the commercialization of the World Wide Web and Internet services in the late 1990′s, while the appearance of exponential growth correlates to the emergence of social media (public Facebook, 2006; YouTube, 2005; Twitter, 2006).

Figure 1: Global Digital Activism Data Set Time Series, 1990-2009

Between initial emergence and exponential growth the pendulum swung back and digital repression began. The most sophisticated and influential censorship system, the Chinese firewall, began development in 1998 and was launched in 2003. As the first wave to social media users, bloggers were also the first to be repressed. That same year, in Iran, Sina Motellabi became the first blogger arrested for political activities. The OpenNet Initiative, a project to “investigate, expose and analyze Internet filtering and surveillance practices” began work in 2004. In 2007 the international blog aggregator Global Voices launched its Advocacy project, “dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.”

From the beginning, we can see this history as a swinging pendulum in which activists tactically innovate and repressive governments respond. It could be argued that the first instance of the effective use of digital tactics in furtherance of an activist campaign (as opposed to as a reporting mechanism) was the use of the web in 1994 by Mexico’s Zapatistas. Though governments began to take action against thrill-seeking hackers as early as 1990′s Operation Sundevil, and China began licensing access and persecuting criminal activities in 1994, I would argue that the first instance of digital repression was the December 1997 issuance of updates to the Security Management Procedures in Internet Accessing, a regulation issued by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security that allowed the government to levy fines for “defaming government agencies,” “splitting the nation,” and leaking “state secrets.” Unlike previous Internet regulation regarding access licensing and cyber-crime and censorship of pornography, this regulation is the first I’ve found to specifically target anti-regime political speech (though a 1996 Singaporean regulation censoring “contents which undermine the public confidence in the administration of justice” brushes very close to that line).

There has even been a pendular motion in the recognition of the effects of digital activism and digital repression on global politics. Clay Shirky’s cyber-optimist tome Here Comes Everybody was published in 2009, while Evgeny Morozov’s cyber-pessimist counter-work The Net Delusion was published in early 2011. Now, thanks to the Arab Spring, we are back to focusing on digital activism.

This pendular motion continues into the present day, with digital tactics and counter-tactics most recently exhibited in Egypt, where activists used the Internet to define the political contest and mobilize supporters and the government responded by shutting the whole system down. Though the activists eventually won in Egypt, it seems that forces of digital repression (both government agents and pro-government citizens) now have the upper hand in Syria.

This pendular motion of tactical innovation and government response was previously referred to as a cat-and-mouse game by Patrick Meier of Ushahidi, who asked in a 2009 blog post:

Is this formidable mix [of a political will to obstruct and a technically competent bureaucracy] enough to smoke out digital activist networks in authoritarian states? “The result,” opines Evgeny [Morozov], “is a cat-and-mouse game in which protestors try to hide from the authorities by caring [sic.] out unconventional niches.” So is Tom-the-cyber-cat going to finally do away with cyber-mouse-Jerry?… I’m not ready to place my bets on either Tom or Jerry. I’d rather be up front and say, I don’t know. It depends.

I’d like to update Patrick’s assertion with a little more certainty: no one will win the cat-and-mouse game. Though there is not yet a Global Digital Repression Data Set, I would bet that it would now also exhibit exponential growth as widely-publicized cases of digital activism in the media (and inter-government cooperation) mean repressive governments are becoming ever more savvy about the political uses of digital technology and are developing their own responses. In fact, as governments put more of their significant resources toward the task, I would not be surprised if in the future we see governments taking the tactical lead and activists taking the reactive position. This is not to imply that governments will win – the Internet still has significant uses for activists – but it is to say that neither side is likely to win soon.

The tactical upper hand is likely to be illusory to both as activists have greater capacity for creative experimentation on their side through their greater numbers and a resilient network infrastructure while governments have greater financial resources and control over that infrastructure within their territories. Decisions on privacy and real name policies will affect the field of play, giving governments an advantage if they are enforced and activists an advantage if they are not. Still, the real tactic battle of digital activist versus repressive government has just begun and the pendulum has just begun to swing.

631 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Defining Digital Activism/Digital Repression/Global Digital Activism Data Set/History of Digital Activism

11

Jul

Digital Activism Through The Ages: Continuing the Flashback

Following my previouspost, Digital Activism: A Look Back,on the history of evolution of digital activism thought, this post will continue to reflect on some scholarly works that highlight interesting cases of early digital activism that used the Internet to transform local organizing into global movements, a trend that grows and is more widely acknowledged today.

Information overload is consuming most of the rational idea spaces these days, with every blogger expressing an opinion and a distorted understanding of citizen journalism. However, the increase in “noise” also means that there is more attention to a wider variety of issues than was the case in earlier years. There is a continued importance devoted to offline action in international media. However, online action has begun to demand a significant amount of coverage as well. Government interventions and restrictions on internet freedom are mainstream news items today. However, it is interesting to note the precursors that have laid this road to mainstream showcase of online activism.

The ICBL and transnational activism

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) is one of the earliest, most effective digital activism campaigns. (Source: icbl.org)

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines(ICBL) that I referred to in my previous post has used the internet as the dominant mode of communication since 1996. A seamless integration of online and offline action, this campaign also took online lobbying to the next level, interacting with governments and policymakers through e-mails. This was also one of the first campaigns to use the internet to move beyond geographic borders, coordinating smaller dedicated movements across countries to work for the common campaign goal. Not only did the internet facilitate better organization across countries, but it also helped enable the treaty’s quick adoption. In her 2001 paper, Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy, Dorothy E. Denning details the ICBL facts mentioned here, also discussing the usage of encryption as a method to circumvent government intervention, even in the late 1990′s (See here).

Firsthand Accounts and real-time reporters

University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Seth F. Kreimer recounts his own experiences during the demonstrations in Philadelphia against the Republican National Convention, during the summer of 2000. While television stations had occasional coverage of the protests, Kreimer says his access to information was through a website established by theprotestersthat provided images and real-time reports of the confrontations between the protestors and police(See here).

He also prudently points out the potential of the web to establish “two-way linkages with potential sympathizers” – a fact that was overlooked by Gladwell when he made his argument against the tweeting of revolutions. With the advent of social media, the bidirectional potential has only increased from the days of e-mails, blogs and chat rooms. This is not to say that linkages (strong or weak) to exchange expertise, information or resources are sufficient to create impact, but they are certainly essential.

The Zapatistas movement was supported by the La Neta computer network. (Source: http://notmytribe.com)

Discussions of protest networks are not quite complete without the ubiquitous Zapatistas group. In their 2005 book Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm, Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen refer to the La Neta computer network, a civil society network, as a significant player in globalizing the Zapatistas movement. This network helped bypass the state’s restrictions in Mexico, and Latham and Sassen rightly observe that a local movement made this network into a transnational information hub.

Contemporary relevance of flashbacks

Lessons learned from these cases are just as relevant and significant to current scenarios as they were earlier. Technology continues to advance and become more adaptable to contemporary challenges. While the Zapatistas had a La Neta, there are tools today (such as this) to protect photographers in the thick of on-field protest actions. A look back at digital activism of any decade is indicative of the consistent thread of adaptability that is synonymous with this field. There is not much we cannot circumvent, hacktivize or digitize. After all, innovation is the lifeblood of this genre of activists.

@nikisrinivasan

683 days ago Short URL Comments

History of Digital Activism

26

Jun

The Name Game

Lack of shared language will maintain the tribalism of study and practice and retard understanding.

Shakespeare wrote that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” but if it were also called a “fragrant blush petalation,” “pink prickler,” or “Valentine’s blossom,” that would certainly cause confusion. When we talk about the effect of digitally networked technologies on contentious politics, we are met with an equally thorny problem: we are in a moment of Babel.

A forthcoming chapter on contingency (strategic use) and hybridity (online-offline duality), by Alix Dunn and Christopher Wilson of The Engine Room, begins:

The academic study of digital media use in political mobilization and advocacy is in the process of defining itself. Spanning a variety of disciplines and theoretical frameworks, analyses of “digital activism”, “new new social movements”, “ICT4HRs” and “cyber movements” constitute an emergent field of study that has yet to assert a common research agenda or mode of analysis.

Updates from a Decade of Babel

Over a decade after the Zapatistas arguable launched modern digital activism as a global phenomenon with their use of the web to promote their cause, followed by the early hacktivist FloodNet solidarity action, we cannot even agree on what we are talking about. (I only use the term “digital activism” here because it is my organization’s focus and it is in regular use, but I acknowledge that it is only one of the several terms jostling to define the field.)

This isn’t a new problem. I first started addressing the battle for definition in 2009, with a post on DigiActive.or when I was first getting interested in the macro-theory of digital activism. The post included several visualizations of the relative popularity of different terms (I used the phrase “mind share” a lot) and I even attempted to define all the terms relative to one another by use of a complicated Venn diagram (see left).

Since then there have been some winners and losers in the name game. Though we’re still only in the quarter-finals of selecting a clear naming convention for this field, I thought an update was in order.

The 1990′s – Less Hip Than Ancient Greeks

So, who are the losers? Any term with the prefix “e-” now seems horribly out-dated, hopelessly linked to the mid-nineties when the public web was in its infancy and a computer was simply an electronic device for doing previously paper-based tasks like sending messages, writing reports, and creating numeric tables. So e-activism and e-advocacy are out.

Interestingly, the same is not true of the even earlier prefix “cyber,” which is actually derived from the Greek kybern?t?s, steersman or pilot, and was used to refer to computers as early as the 1970s, when the Control Data Corporation (CDC) sold the “Cyber” range of supercomputers. Yet the cyber prefixs hangs on. Not only is it in common usage in the terms “cybercrime” and “cyber-attack,” hacktivists themselves use it. The alternately lulzy and politically motivated hacker group LulzSec has defined their mission as “the expression of energy through comically malicious and entertaining cybermaterials.” So while the term cyberactivism is less in vogue, its prefix may still prove to be relevant.

It Helps to Have a Posse

Then there are the terms-with-organizational-constituencies. Info-activism was coined and is promulgated by Tactical Technology Collective. The earliest reference to liberation technology was an article by Frederick Noronha in a 2003 issue of Linux Journal, but the term is currently being promulgated by the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford.

Likewise the term civic media, while broader than the other two, was in the early nineties, when the Civic Media Center opened in Gainesville, Florida, yet the term is now promulgated most visibly by the Center for Civic Media at MIT, founded in 2007 with the word “future” in its title.

Though from a much smaller stage, I guess it’s fair that I take some blame for pushing the term digital activism, first through DigiActive.org and now through this project. The earliest usage I found for the term was a 2003 London event sponsored by OneWorld.net and CyberSalon.org and it’s popular internationally among grassroots activists.

When you’re a word, it helps to have a posse, a group of people that you can count on to use you in papers, blog posts, tweets, and events, to define you, to spread you far and wide. While the words above are affiliated with specific organizations, even a term like social media for social change (coined in 2008 by blogger Gradon Tripp), is particularly popular in the Western NGO world as a way for established social change organizations to harness the power of new media to increase their efficacy.

People who come from a traditional organizing background have promoted the term online organizing as a means to digitally enhance the work of engaging citizens to mobilize their peers around issues of mutual concern. The New new social movements and cyber movements that Dunn and Wilson mention come from academia’s attempts to draw social movement theory into a twenty-first century context.

In a way, the fragmentation in terminology merely reflects the fragmentation of these constituencies. The sociologists have their terms and so do the organizers and the social media consultants. As long as these constituencies are able to be understood among themselves, there is little motivation to develop terms that are understood across constituencies. The lack of communication and coordination among the different groups engaged in the study and use of digital technology in a political context is both caused and exacerbated by the lack of common terminology.

One Word to Rule Them All?

This is not to say that improved communication would lead to a single consensus term. These words are not interchangeable. “Social media for social change” refers to a specific type of digital tools while “online organizing” implies both an Internet-based tool set and a specific means of using them. ICT4HR implies the broadest possible tool set (even a landline phone or telegraph would be included), but does specify a type of cause: human rights.

There will not be one word that wins out and comes to define all interaction between humans, technology, and social and political power. The problem is that these terms do not actually have mutually exclusive meanings and the terminology of our field is marked by imprecision. People use words like “digital activism” and “online organizing” interchangeably where there meanings rightly include some areas of overlap and some of mutual exclusivity.

Time for Closure

Wiebe Bijker of the University of Maastricht has an elegant little term for the way in which social groups differ over the definition of a social artifact they share: “interpretive flexibility.” In his 2008 book Technology & Social Power, Graeme Kirkpatrick of the University of Manchester explains:

…Writing the social history of an artefact in constructionist terms involves identifying a series of steps or phases in its development. First, it will be possible to identify one or more relevant social groups who participate in defining the artefact, constituting it as a meaningful object and picking out certain of its possibilities. These groups will then be found to differ over its correct interpretation…. During this time the artifact is said to have “interpretive flexibility”… its meaning-significance is open to be negotiated and contested by relevant social groups.

I quoted this same passage in 2009, and we have not made much progress towards “rhetorical closure,” the final step in defining the meaning of a new technology. Yes, certain terms like “e-advocacy” and “e-activism” have lost popularity, but others, like “liberation technology,” are on the rise.

In a way, it is defensible that our terminology changes as the phenomena itself does. The “e-advocacy” or the nineties is certainly a different beast than the “social media for social change” of the aughts.

Yet to see a narrowing of terms, a consensus. I fear that this lack of shared language will maintain the tribalism of study and practice and thus retard our understanding of this incredibly important phenomena. The Tower of Babel is a symbol of shared language divided. We have never had that moment. Yet we must work to create a shared vocabulary if we wish to build shared understanding together.

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Defining Digital Activism/History of Digital Activism/Interdisciplinarity

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