Note: This post is a response to Book Review: “Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age” by Jennifer Earl (Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara) I appreciate the chance that Mary has given us to reply to her critical review of our book, Digitally Enabled Social Change (2011, MIT Press). Given [...]

Note: This post is followed by a response from the authors. Broad-based empirical studies are sorely needed to understand the effect of digital technology on contentious politics, a field where battling anecdotes predominate.  Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport’s new book, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age attempts to fill this need.  However, [...]

There are two important causal questions for digital activism researchers: what causes digital activism and what does digital activism cause?  The former is easier to answer.  The latter is more difficult but also more interesting. These two questions can be visualized in linear time where the causes of digital activism (from macro contextual factors like [...]

Note: The authors’ views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government In my last post I discussed how the U.S. Government (USG) is funding civil society organizations (CSOs) abroad to help build their capacity to use new media in the [...]

This morning I was reading Digitize This Book! for my side project on digital epistemology when I came across this 2001 quote from a book by Peter Lunenfeld, a professor in the Design|Media Arts department at UCLA. A critical theory of technological media will always be in inherent conflict with the practice of creating these very media. For if theory demands [...]

By Travis Mayo, Program Analyst at USAID Bureau for Global Health Note: The authors’ views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government Like a large ship, government agencies rarely change course quickly.  However, when a new path is set there [...]

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 [...]

Jeff Nunokawa, Professor of English and scholar or nineteenth-century literature at Princeton University, likes to use social media in his work: Nunokawa… began using Facebook in 2005, as an alternative to burdening his students with too many exhortatory emails. By now he has written more than three thousand notes. “They are brief essays… rendering the [...]

Though they often use it as a weapon against each other, cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists agree on one thing: digital activism cannot be effective without connecting back to the real world.  Because all our institutions of power still exist offline, in order to influence real-world outcomes, digital actions must have real-world effects.  Yet we are far [...]

Note: In the interest of open research, we are sharing infographics of our in-process project, the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS). We hope that this transparency will elicit original perspectives and constructive critique. Previous posts are here and here. Above is a bubble graph of the most popular sources in the GDADS, those which [...]