The Internet and Activism: Let’s Get Empirical and Analytical
Working through Morozov’s Net Delusion book, which is well-written and offers some nice examples and critiques of ‘cyber-utopianism’. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether I’ve ever met (or will ever meet) a cyber-utopian, who would argue that in simple access to open networks and technologies, empowers grassroots activism and democracies. Much more likely, a combination of various conditions, which themselves empower or disempower, institutions and peoples, impact uses of networked technologies for grassroots or policing aims. It’s very fashionable to dismiss the internet’s uses on the grassroots level as hype, though there are plenty of examples to the contrary, including work my colleague and I have done in Kyrgyzstan, and the wonderful illustration done by Frontline on PBS of youth protesters in Egypt.
More on this issue coming soon, but it seems to me what we are begging for is a more analytical approach toward studying the conditions that impact grassroots activism versus policing. Specifically, what are the conditions by which grassroots appropriation occur vs. the Morozov’s Iran/China/Belarus dystopia? What assemblages of institutions and social demographics impact DIY appropriation vs. what types of state configurations push further oppression? This would have to take into account such factors as institutions in a society and how internet use amplifies (as per Phil Agre) their goals, levels of technological literacy and expertise, attitudes of governments, larger socioeconomic realities of the nation, relationship to other layers of media, including digital television, coalitions and communication patterns between networks of activists, and more. I’m working on distilling this further so we can start to move past a rather pointless debate.
These are the questions that should frame the debate rather than cherry-picked strawman examples, that are then overly extrapolated. If we get more analytical and empirical, then we can start to answer the much more important question that I wrote about on the front page of the Huffington Post last week : How *should* the internet matter and how do we make those conditions possible?
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Ramesh, excellent beginning. As for comparative case studies, one historical one could be the Zapatistas which we could research through secondary and critical literature. From the medianthro list: “That online media technologies are able to support sociopolitical change and movements is nothing new. 16 years ago newsgroups, mailing lists and websites created what could be termed an electronic or digital solidarity scape that included local activists and international supporters during and after the Zapatista uprising. … On the issue of internet-related politics since the Zapatista uprising, raised by Philipp, there’s a very useful discussion of the ‘e-mobilization’ literature up until the mid-2000s in Andrew Chadwick’s textbook Internet Politics (2006), see Chapter 6.” This historicity is something that always foils technopessimists and utopians.
Agree. It’s time to move on and get more analytical about the relation between new technologies and social movements. The time for the debate about cyber-utopianism and distopianism is barren.
The previous comment is also very interesting, specially in relation with the online zapatism… ‘cos online activism and hackactivism has already some years of history. About that I’ll recommend to look about Electronic Disturbance Theater: http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/EDTECD.html – and – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Disturbance_Theater
On the other hand, the stories about hackers organisations online are very interesting, ‘cos represent examples of non-grasstoot activism, that is digital-born activism. As the Chanology project from Anonymous (I wrote something about that, but’s in spanish: http://sociologiayredessociales.com)
Not to talk about the european “revolutions” that are having a tremensous impact in here, mixing social activism in the streets with media diffusion on the Web.
See you around.
Javier.