DigiActive.org

Defining Digital Activism: Part 1 – Where Do We Come From?

In 1897, a few years  after moving to Tahiti, the French artist Paul Gauguin created his master work, an allegorical painting entitled “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” While planning this series of blog posts on the current state of digital activism, Gauguin’s three questions kept coming back to me.  After searching for other frameworks, I decided his was the best for this analysis of the digital activism space, its actors, actions, strengths, weaknesses, and possible futures.

We begin with the first question: Where do we come from?  While most of us think of digital activism as emanating only from practitioners (digital activists themselves), there is actually a complex ecology of different actors whose thoughts and actions affect how we understand digital activism and what digital activism is.  Though there are many sub-categories, we can think of digital activism’s actors as emerging from three groups: doers, builders, and thinkers.

Doers are the activists, the practitioners who carry out digital activism campaigns.  Builders provide the infrastructure that makes digital activism possible, either by creating applications and institutions or by providing funds. Thinkers collect, analyze, and disseminate information about what digital activism is and what it means.

The size of the bubble refers to the relative size of the group, with doers being the largest.  Areas of overlap refer to multiple roles: a person who is both a builder and doer, a thinker and builder. Let’s look at these groups at a higher resolutions and deconstruct the different sub-roles within each category:

Doers

Doers create digital activism through their practices: Tweets tweeted, blogs posted, databases segmented, videos uploaded, strategies failed or realized.  It is through them that the infrastructure of the builders is tested (in the case of activist platforms) or appropriated (in the case of commercial ones) and the ideas of the thinkers are applied.  It is from their actions that thinkers create theories and interpretations about what digital activism means.

Non-profits: The category of doers is the largest and potentially the most complex, so I have divided it into three groups which comprise many more: non-profit organizations, grassroots activists, and politicians. These groups are determined by the types of digital campaigns they run.  Non-profits run institutional issue campaigns, aimed at a certain policy outcome and executed with the resources of the non-profit behind it.  Examples include the global campaign for youth sexual rights of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, MoveOn.org’s  campaign for health care reform in the United States, and the many human rights and environmental campaigns run by the online campaigning organization Avaaz.

Grassroots activists: This group also runs issue campaign, but they differ from non-profit campaigns in that theirs are ad hoc issue campaigns.  They neither emerge from, and rarely lead to, sustained organizations.  As a result they have fewer resources.  DigiActive devotes itself primarily to recording and analyzing cases of grassroots digital activism around the world and some of the most dramatic and successful examples are the 2008 campaign to free Fouad Mourtada in Morocco, the 2009 citizen journalism campaign to publish the names of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake in China, and the protests against corrupt elections in Moldova, also in 2009.

Politicians:  It is certainly up for debate whether campaigns by politicians can be considered digital activism.   However, as digital activism can be defined as the use of digital technology to further campaigns for social and political change, electoral campaigns by politicians who actually wish to change society do fall within this category.  In fact, because of the built-in competitiveness of electoral campaigns and the sums of money that are often raised by the campaigns of major candidates, the digital activism of political campaigns is often the most rigorous and effective of the three types.  The most famous examples come from the United States.  The 2008 campaign of President Obama is the most prominent and justly so as it included a branded social network, MyBarackObama, online tools for voter-to-voter persuasion, and a sophisticated email strategy.  (Full disclosure: I was New Media Operations Manager on the campaign.)  However, the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean, which found the favor of bloggers and used the platform Meetup.com to facilitate decentralized event organization, certainly deserves credit for showing the potential of social media to enrich a campaign by helping supporters to organize their own social networks on the campaign’s behalf.  And, just because digital political campaigning is most robust in the US, doesn’t mean that other politicians are not also getting in on the act, as the Facebook campaign of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez demonstrates.

Builders

The contribution of builders to digital activism is often ignored as it is often invisible.They create the infrastructure which allows digital activism to function: platforms, software, organizations, injections of money.

Non-Profit Techies: Let’s start with the most obvious group of builders, the non-profit techies.  This group extends from techies who actually build new platforms, like Roger Dingledine, a creator of the “onion router” Tor and Nathan Freitas, creator of the encrypted mobile platform Guardian, to the hacktivists who created the bot nets during the conflict between Georgia and Russia in 2008, and the Technology Guy (or Girl) at your local non-profit.  What unites them is that they use their developing and coding skills out of love (or hate) rather than because of a profit motive.   Not surprisingly, this group strongly overlaps with the doer group as non-profit techies often take direction on behalf of a cause they care about.  Nathan, for instance,  not only built Guardian but also was instrumental in building custom mobile video solutions for the rights group Students for a Free Tibet.   Ken Banks, creator of the mobile platform FrontlineSMS, started life as an environmental activist.

For-Profit Techies:  Though platforms built specifically for activists, like Tor and Guardian, are obviously part of the digital activism infrastructure, most digital activism takes place on commercial platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.   Activists, particularly grassroots activists, appreciate the issue agnostic ready-made architecture of these platforms and the fact that they are free to use and already populated with potential supporters.  It is only rarely that we think of the technologists and companies that build these tools as part of the digital activism ecology, since they do not design their platforms for activists (Facebook Causes is an important exception).  Only sometimes can we can see their true importance, Twitter forestalled scheduled maintenance in order for the platform to continue to be accessible to activists in Iran, getting some great press and acknowledging their role as an activist platform.

Donors:  Beyond applications, we must also think of the infrastructure of digital activism in terms of programs, institutions, and staff.  In the case of both non-profit and political campaigns – and sometimes even grassroots ones – donors play a large role in which types of digital campaigns occur and sometimes the tone of those campaigns as well.  While access to free online organizing and communications tools has made grassroots activists less reliant on financial resources, and thus also less reliant on donors, this group plays a significant role in creating digital capacity.

Donors come in two flavors, private and public.  While private can refer to individual micro-donations (as was the case with the Obama campaign), donors are more easily able to shape campaigns when they have the leverage of a large grant.  Here we are speaking of private foundations.  The most active foundations in this space are the Open Society Institute of financier George Soros and the Dutch development organization Hivos.  The Knight Foundation, though its focus is journalism, has also been active in the digital space through support of online citizen media. Not to be under-estimated is the role of public donors: the agencies and ministries of national governments.    The US government has been particularly active in the digital activism space in funding the dissemination of anti-censorship tools for activists and financing the study of democracy online.

Entrepreneurs:  I choose to introduce this group in the builders’ section, but they are truly a result of the overlap between the three categories of doers, builders, and thinkers.  I mention entrepreneurs in this section because they create the institutional infrastructure of digital activism.  Broadly speaking, each for-profit Internet company is the creation of a business entrepreneur and each non-profit organization is the creation of a social entrepreneur.  Not surprisingly, the best entrepreneurship in the digital activism space comes from the doers, people who are actually engaged in digital activism.  Here I am thinking of the creators of the crisis-mapping platform (and organization) Ushahidi, politically active African bloggers who decided to create a tool to track post-election violence in Kenya, and Esra’a Al Shafei, founder of digital activism powerhouse Mideast Youth, which is creating new standards of volunteer-driven digital human rights campaigning.

Thinkers

The thinkers are the smallest but potentially the most critical group in defining what digital activism is.  They are the filter through which the tactics of digital activism are shared, analyzed, improved upon, and re-integrated into practice.  Without thinkers, digital activism practice would not improve but would forever iterate past methods.   The range from the practical to the highly conceptual, to what to tweet about to the social construction of technology.  Digital activism is most likely to move forward when all levels of analysis are interlinked are and closely integrated with practice, a theme I’ll return to later in this series.

Consultants and Trainers: Consultants and trainers are the closest to the doers, the realists of the thinker group.  In general, consultants create customized digital solutions for individual clients while trainers create generalized solutions for mixed groups.  Though there is much overlap in roles (many consultants are trainers and many trainers are consultants), these two are considered as separate because of the differences in knowledge flows, which will be discussed later in the series.   However, for the purposes of role definition we can discuss them together.

Consultants and trainers both operate at a practical level.  As their position at the overlap of doers and thinkers indicates, they take their own experiences in digital activism, synthesize and draw out key lessons, and then present those lessons to clients and trainees.  In the political space the top digital consultants are Blue State Digital, which was the primary vendor to the Obama campaign and include many former campaign members, and EchoDitto, born of the Dean campaign.   These groups also consult to non-profits.  There are also consultants and trainers that focus specifically on non-profits, most famously blogger Beth Kanter.  The organization Tactical Technology Collective works with both non-profits and grassroots activists, focusing on resource-constrained societies.

Scholars: Scholars stand at the opposite extreme from trainers and consultants.  While both draw on the actions of the doers for their material, trainers and consultant seek to impart practical skills about how to run a successful campaign, while scholars seek to extract general patterns and theoretical frameworks which are more useful to those that seek to understand the dynamics of digital activism than those who run campaigns.  Prominent scholars whose work touched on the field of digital activism include Manuel Castells, Cass Sunstein, Yochai Benkler, and Eszter Hargittai.

Public Intellectuals:   The difference between scholars and public intellectuals is audience.  The work of scholars is read and known by other scholars, whereas the work of public intellectuals is read by a gradually widening group of semi-experts and non-experts.  The prominence of a public intellectual is directly correlated to the accessibility of his or her ideas to a non-experts audience.  In this group we find scholars, but also bloggers and journalists who have developed an expertise in digital activism.  This group includes mostly bloggers, like Ethan Zuckerman, Evgeny Morozov, and Katrin Verclas, and authors like Clay Shirky.

Of course, the most interesting people in this field defy categorization.  Lawrence Lessig is a public intellectual, scholar, serial entrepreneur, and activist in the fields of open culture and political accountability.   Ethan Zuckerman also wears the public intellectual and entrepreneur hat, having co-founded the blogging site Global Voices.  It is this cross-pollanization which often leads to the most creative ideas and most robust solutions.

Media: The final group is the media, by which I should really say the “mainstream” or “legacy” media, since there are many bloggers and tweeters in the other thinker categories.   While the media often develops the shallowest analysis of digital activism, it also has the widest audience, thus acting as a mediator (a media, if you will) between digital activists in different fields and geographic regions, and between activists and the general public.

…And Everyone Else

General Public: Although we have not considered them yet, the general public is also an actor in the space of digital activism.  The presence of activism campaigns on popular platforms like Facebook has made it extremely easy (maybe too easy) to become a digital activist.  By becoming activists, the general public permeates the doer category, moving from general public to activist role with the click of a mouse and back again, often just as quickly.  The other two categories – thinker and builder – are also somewhat permeable to the general public, though less so.  To become a builder the barrier is technical expertise and to become a thinker the barrier is a level of knowledge of the field, skills of analysis and synthesis and, to become a public intellectual, the gift of the gab.

Conclusions

So, where do we come from?  From academia and from political campaigns, from the government and a chance search on Facebook.   Some of us are here to stay and some of us are only engaged in digital activism for a day.  Yet through our actions, and our reflections on those actions, we create digital activism, both as a field of action and as a field of thought.

In the next post in this series I will analyze knowledge flows among actors in this field: who has the ideas, how they are created and shared,  and the road blocks that prevent better communication and thus limit the effectiveness of activism.

Hat-tip: thanks to boyfriend/social media guru Gaurav Mishra for working with me to develop this framework.