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. [...]

Next Monday and Tuesday I’ll be at Stanford for the Liberation Technology Program‘s conference on Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes.  I’ll try to blog as many speaker presentations as possible.  Summary agenda is below and you can also download the full version here (PDF). Monday, October 11th SESSION I: How are individuals using liberation technologies [...]

Though the title is a bit silly, “Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics” (PDF), published by the United States Institute of Peace, is the best analysis I’ve read so far on digital activism research.  It takes a broad view, correctly diagnosing the current state of the field and making astute recommendations about methodology [...]

by Mary Joyce (updated) What can digital technology actually do for activists?  The response to this question usually comes in the form of a long list of tools or a recounting of several case studies.  But what if we looked at these tools and cases in the aggregate and focused on the similarities?  Could we [...]

Last week, The Guardian ran a piece called “Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism,” (12 August 2010) by Micah White.  The basis of it was that digital activism has been diminished to mere tallying of things like clicks, email subscribers, Facebook followers… you name it. While he offers a small glimmer of hope at the end, [...]

by Mary Joyce A decade ago, academics began to study a crucially important type of extra-institutional political behavior: terrorism.  As always, government response did not wait on rigorous analysis.  A  week after the September 11th attacks, President Bush announced the cause of terrorism: the fundamental inconsistency of values (“they hate our freedom”), and a policy [...]

by Mary Joyce Probably due to pressure to be more profitable, Wired is fast becoming just another guy culture mag: articles from the current issue include a gadget profile of an electronic lock pick (“who uses it: locksmiths, detectives, military personnel”), a toned abdomen illustrating a new insulin monitor, and tips for geek dads. So [...]

by Mary Joyce In a few days the Meta-Activism Project will launch a splash page for Digital Activism Decoded – the first book about digital activism – which will be available for free download on this site on June 1st. According to the back cover, the book aims to decode “the underlying mechanics of… digital [...]

by Mary Joyce “Before engineers could build airplanes, physicists first had to understand the principals of flight.” The above quote is from a 2003 book entitled Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan Watts, who currently works as principal research scientist at Yahoo!. Though this book may at first appear to be [...]