Today I watched The Name of the Rose, a gloomy film about a medieval Sherlock Holmes named William of Baskerville (just in case the Holmes connection was not otherwise evident). It got me thinking about inductive and deductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning we move from the aggregation of  discrete observations to create a theory that [...]

In the wake of the Arab Spring, there are few dichotomies left in mass media.   Producer and Consumer?  Dead.  Blogs started the battle years ago, when the “former audience” began to produce their own content.  Now the former audience creates content not only for one another but also for broadcast media.  Where would the [...]

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 [...]

The Meta-Activism Project works because of all the smart people that devote their time, energy, and brain-power to the study of digital activism.  One expert who has given some great support to the Meta-Activism Project is Philip N. Howard, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington and author of The Digital Origins of [...]

Beyond the specifics of Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, Ukraine in 2004, or the Philippines in 2001, what is the global effect of digital technology on revolutions? Digital networks are a structural factor that decrease the costs of revolution. Authoritarian regimes respond with ever more repressive practices that send their countries in two possible directions.  [...]

How Could Social Media Affect Mobilizing Structures? “Mobilizing structures” (established organizations or prior networks that help groups to mobilize) are perhaps the element of social movement analysis most likely to be altered by the presence of social media, since much of social media is about group behavior. I am sure I’ll be writing more about [...]

To what extent does the insertion of digital technology alter our existing assumptions about activism?  This is the question I’ve put to Doug McAdam in reading his book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.  In my last post I laid out a range of possible effects digital technology can have on three [...]

When I first became interested in digital activism in 2004-5  I was convinced it was an entirely new phenomenon.  The longer I’ve studied it the more I’ve become convinced that understanding digital activism means having a foundation in a variety of related fields, most of them relating to the “activism” rather than the “digital.” I’ve [...]

Patrick Meier, a fellow at Stanford, has shared a draft the literature review for his doctoral thesis, “Do ‘Liberation Technologies’ Change the Balance of Power Between Repressive Regimes and Civil Society?”.  Though the loaded term “liberation technology” implies a certain bias in how that question will be answered, it is an important one: do information [...]

UPDATED: I decided to take notes while participating today in the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict‘s webinar, The Digital Duel: Resistance and Repression in an Online World.  These comments are from Daryn Cambridge, Director for Knowledge & Digital Strategies at ICNC. I hope they are useful and I apologize for any errors in summarizing them. [...]