Monday morning, the Israel Defense Force raided a flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, where nine activists were fatally shot. Everyone seems to agree with the lineup of events up until that point. The interesting thing about this whole situation is how both sides used online video to plead their cases, possibly giving insight into how communications and PR spin fixates itself into international relations in the future.

According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the activists on board “deliberately attacked soldiers.”

And IDF has video on their YouTube channel to prove their point:

Meanwhile the folks on the flotilla tell a different story. The Free Gaza Movement says that “Israeli commandoes dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep.”

Like with the Nestle/Greenpeace situation, will governments use social media to get ahead of a PR disaster in the future?

Michel is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives.  I heard him speak yesterday at the great Internet as Factory and Playground conference in New York.  Michel didn’t set me straight directly, but his definition of crowdsourcing, and its distinction from peer-to-peer collaboration, made me see the error of my ways.

The key is that crowdsourcing is still centralized: the producer is still a cog in a machine, only the machine is bigger.  It’s not a factory, it’s the entire world, and producers are connected by the network, not be shared physical space.  The individual producer chooses which part of the task she will take, she takes a much smaller part, and she decides whether or not to participate, but she does not decide what the overall project is.  Whether the task is something as malevolent as identifying Iranian protesters for the government or as benign as fans re-shooting Star Wars, the task is defined at the center, produced at the edge.   It is no coincidence that the term crowdsourcing derives from another practice of hierarchical labor distribution: outsourcing.

Peer to peer production is different:  it is center-less and it is non-hierarchical.  Even if someone is organizing, that person has no more power than any other member of the project.  There is no center and edge.  There is only the network.  The web site doesn’t make the origins clear, but if Star Wars: Uncut is organized by a group of fans, then their project to re-shoot their favorite movie by piecing together thousands of scenes re-staged by other fans is peer-to-peer.  If the project is organized by Lucasfilm Ltd., then it is being crowdsourced.  It is all about who benefits and where the power lies.

What would this mean in the political realm? Crowdsourced politics means that the center benefits ultimately from the divided labor: for example, a political campaign asking supporters to host fundraisers in their homes or directing citizens to call their Congressman to support or  opposed a piece of legislation.   The effects of crowdsourcing might be in the public interest, but even though execution of the task occurs at the edge, the ultimate decision of what the activity will be is decided at the center.

Peer-to-peer politics is much more chaotic, but also much more interesting.  For example, the current state of the Tea Party movement in the United States, though espousing conservative political views, is not centrally organized by traditional powers of the right, including the Republican party.   Even when one of its most effective organizers, blogger and web strategist Eric Odom, decided to re-join the Republican party earlier this month, the movement did not die (or at least has not yet).

It is this form of political organizing, peer-to-peer not crowdsourced, that has the greatest potential to truly challenge existing institutions.  When power is concentrated in groups of citizens rather than institutions, there is a potential for lack of  accountability as the group may rely on no one but its members for resources.  However, the lack of connection to traditional power structures could also mean the group is not not beholden to institutions that are accountable to special interests such as corporations or economic, religious, or political elites.

Because of the Internet, peer-to-peer  politics is likely to become a permanent feature of the American political scene, and perhaps that of other countries as well.  It will certainly destabilize existing formal and informal political institutions.  Whether this destabilization will be ultimately beneficial for the majority of citizens is yet to be seen.

H/T to Lawrence Lessig for the title

Update:  Thanks to  feedback from Dirk Slater I’ve changed the title to “A Broader Network for Digital Activism”, which recognizes the great work that organizations like Tactical Tech have done to create  global networks of activists.

The Promise of Global Citizen Empowerment

The promise of digital activism is to crowdsource global political transformation by giving ordinary citizens around the world the ability to more effectively campaign for social and political causes. The collective result of these campaigns would be a global closing of the gap between the powerful and powerless and a fundamental shift in political life around the world.

The Reality of Limited Success

Yet this best case scenario is only one possible outcome of the injection of digital technology into politics. Repressive governments around the world have proven quite adept at spinning and blocking the tools of digital activism and censoring and persecuting activists. Though the technology-assisted protest movements in Iran, Moldova, and Egypt, received a great deal of press, they were not successful in challenging the political power structures in their countries or even in winning modest reforms.

For all its success in spreading information and facilitating the mobilization of people and resources, the successes of digital activism are few and far between and its future is far from assured. If we want to achieve the promise of digital activism, interventions will be necessary.

The Disconnected Players

There are many players who intervene on behalf of digital activism, whose actions serve to spread and strengthen it. There are governments, private foundations, non-profit and for-profit trainers and consultants, public intellectuals, software and hardware companies, the media, and of course the activists themselves. Together they create the digital activism ecosystem.

Yet these players do not see themselves as part of the same ecosystem. The COO of Facebook may meet with an official at the State Department, but a representative of Hivos, an active Dutch technology funder, probably will not be in the room. High-powered political technology consultants may meet prominent bloggers at a conference, but a representative of the GSM Association, which facilitates global mobile phone standardization, probably will not be invited.

In order to create a common agenda for the promotion of digital activism around the world, players must first see that they are playing on the same field.

The Need for a Network

What is needed in this field is a networking organization unlike any other. The purpose of this organization will not be to strengthen the bonds of an existing network, as is usually the case, but to create a network where none currently exists.

What would be the strategy of such an organization? The expectation would be to go straight to policy by holding events on mobile innovation or technical assistance programs and seeking to build collaborative relationships between the various institutions in the field.

However, starting at the institutional and policy level would be premature. The first step should be to focus on relationships. It is daunting to try to engineer organizational coordination between the Department of State and the GSM Association, but can Alec Ross, Secretary Clinton’s Senior Advisor on Innovation, share a coffee with Tom Phillips, Chief Government and Regulatory Affairs Officer at the GSMA? Yes, he could. Could Ory Okolloh, co-creator of the mobile crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, and Josh Elman, Twitter’s Product Manager, also be at that meeting? Yes, they could, and what an interesting meeting it would be. Imagine the e-mail thread the day after and the effect of future cooperation.

Priorities for the First Year

In its first year, this organization should seek to hold at least a dozen informal networking events around the world to bring together the key players in the disparate fields of digital activism so that they see each other as colleagues and collaborators. Initially, the role of the networking organization would only be to put players together, not to set a policy agenda. Follow-through would be up to participants themselves.

Though the potential returns of such a program could be enormous, the costs would be low: a few staff members to organize the events and the logistical cost of the events themselves. The goal of the program would be no more and no less than to create a network of people to build digital activism’s best future.

To download a PDF version, please click:

When we think about “social media” we most often think about digital applications: blogs, social networks, wikis, SMS.  Yet Wikipedia defines social media as “media designed to be disseminated through social interaction,” and these practices have existed for centuries.  Looking at historical cases of social media outside the digital context can help to clarify underlying mechanics which are often lost in the hype surrounding current tools.

The image I referred to in the first paragraph is above at left: a man named Gordon who was formerly  enslaved in Mississippi before escaping and taking refuge with the Union Army in Louisiana during the American Civil War.  The photograph was taken by an army doctor and used by activists to vividly illustrate the inhumanity and cruelty and slavery.  While the image was disseminated in mainstream media outlets like The New York Independent and Harper’s Weekly newspapers, and as a projected image in lectures by abolitionists, the social media aspect of the campaign was the “carte to visite”. (source)

Cartes de visites – French for “visiting card” – were a very popular social practice among wealthy and middle class Americans in the 19th century.   The cards, which used to simply bear a visitor’s name,  were originally used in the social protocol of aristocrat Europe.  They became popularized with the advent and increasing affordability of photography and were collected among friends and neighbors.  It would not be uncommon for a collection of cartes de visites to be displayed in the parlor.  Photos of political celebrities were particularly popular and social campaigns also used the practice to spread their message. (source)

So what can we learn about modern social media activism from the analogue social media of the visiting card?  Here are 3 lessons:

1. Effective social media campaigns are built on top of robust social practices.

In this day and age we tend to focus on new tools and what they can do.  We pay less attention to the social practices that surround these tools.  Many nonprofits create Facebook and Twitter accounts because of the hype surrounding them, even if their target audience is not using the application and if there is no clear connection between the organization’s strategic goals and the application’s capacities.

The first cartes de visites were created in 1854 in France, but did not arrive in the US until several years later.  If American abolitionists had come up with a campaign in which people distributed photos of  slaves through their social networks in the early 1850s, the campaign would have fallen flat on its face.   The success of the abolitionists’ carte de visite campaign was reliant on the practice of carte de visite just as much as  the technology of the photograph.

2. Technology creates affordances, making new outcomes possible but not certain

In his great book, The Wealth of Networks, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler describes technology as creating “affordances”, qualities of the object that make an action possible.   Just as the technology of the social network today allows for free international collaboration and event organization, the photograph allowed middle class urban people in the 1800’s who had never visited a plantation to see the horrors of slavery.  The key here is possibility.   The technology of  the photograph made the grassroots carte de visite campaign possible, but the it was the practice of sharing cartes de visites that made it a success.

3. A successful social media campaign will give equal weight to the technologies available and the practices of the target audience.

Recent history has taught us that successful social media campaigns occur in the sweet spot of social practices and available technology: the American middle class and online campaign donations, Facebook and expatriate communities,  SideWiki and British news junkies.

Often the “sweet” technology is not the newest and hippest.  Research by scholars like Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of Columbia University shows that in American political campaigns, it is often mundane technology like e-mail and the phone which are most useful to campaign organizers.   Social media campaigners and consultants are drawn to the newest technology, equating innovation with effectiveness, but the most effective communication solution may be ten years old – or entirely offline.   As we campaign and advise campaigners we must remember that technology creates new possibilities, but people make the campaign.

1. The network allows for multiple sources of information and interpretation, which creates multiple possible realities.
2. Reinterpretations of interest can result from exposure to these multiple realities.
3. When people reinterpret their interest the network also allows near-free mass broadcast and collaboration, which allows people to act collectively on behalf of their new interests.
4. But…the network does not tell people which action would be most effective, leading to passionate yet often ineffectual responses that challenge but do not significantly change the existing power system.

These points are explained in greater detail below.

1. Multiple sources of information = multiple realities.

It is practically a cliche now to say that citizen-generated media like blogs, Twitter, and cell phone video, challenge the political status quo.  Think of Twitter-assisted protests in Moldova, cell phone video captured in Iran, and China’s impressive efforts to censor and spin blog content.   These examples are deliberately mixed between examples of citizens disseminating objective information (an un-doctored image, recounting of an event) and subjective interpretation (whether a policy is good or bad, the implications of the event).

Both information and interpretation can be dangerous to a repressive regime because they create multiple perspectives and thus multiple realities.  In one reality, disseminated through state-sponsored propaganda and spin, a government may be powerful yet beneficent.  In another reality, propagated by bloggers and tweeters, the government is dictatorial and abusive.

According to the “three faces of power” framework of British political scientist Steven Lukes,  institutions exercise power at three levels: the level of decision-making (policies that are voted on or otherwise debated, like gay marriage in 2009), the level of non-decision-making (policies that cannot be publicly debated because of stigma or social sanction, like gay marriage in 1979), and the level of ideology (policies that are not debated because citizens are unaware of – or oppose – a policy that would be beneficial, like gay marriage in 1879).

Citizen-generated information and interpretation, which the network disseminates, operate at the level of ideology.  New information causes citizens to see authority figures or social practices in news ways.  New interpretations cause citizen to re-evaluate information they were previously aware of, changing “corruption is a part of life” to “corruption is an injustice I should resist” or “people are mostly free in my country” to “the government frequently commits human rights violations.”

2. Reinterpretation of  interests

This new information and interpretation can make people reinterpret their own interests within the political system.  For example, when the woman who once thought corruption was an unchangeable part of life now sees it as an injustice to resist, she may cease to be complicit with corrupt officials by not paying bribes  or at least no longer align herself with their interests by turning a blind eye.  A man who once saw his country as basically free and is now aware of human rights violations by his government may join an opposition group or may simply act with greater scepticism about the governments actions.  He now sees his own interests as being different – or even in conflict with – the interests of the government.

3.  Collective action

So far, we have really only addressed the network characteristics of Web 1.0, the readable web: citizens receives new information through the network and, in response, reinterpret their own interests with relation to the power structure.   However, we are now in the age of Web 2.0, the read-write web.  People not only consume content online, they create it, and not only at the level of isolated content like uploading a video or writing a blog post. The global middle class is in many instances tethered to the Internet and other networked devices, like cell phones and smart phones.  They are exchanging content with friends, colleagues, and strangers every day through IM, SMS, email, and status updates on social networks.

It is this intensity of communication, of constant yet small-scale content creation and response, that allows for massive collaboration.  In analyzing the network with regard to collective action, we should thus not focus on citizen-generated content.  This is only the beginning of a much more interesting chain of content and response that allows collective action to form: an active blog thread becomes a call to action, a Twitter hash-tag moves from observation to planning.

4. Action occurs, but is often ineffective.

So actions occur: short-lived outdoor protest movements, like those in Moldova, Burma, and Iran, strikes like the one in Egypt, and sometimes even vandalism, like the recent unrest in Greece.  After these spurts of activity, nothing really changes.  The power structure carries on more or less the same.  Citizens are now disillusioned with that power structure but see their action as ineffectual, and fall back into patterns of acquiescence, which is indistinguishable from consent with the status quo.    The power structure has certainly been weakened because citizens no longer align their own interests with those of the power structure, but that does not mean the structure will shift.  It will likely only become more violent and oppressive due to fear of its own citizens.  This violence, of course, results in further acquiescence.

The network provides the motivation and means for political action, but not the answer as to what that action should be.   This is no coincidence.  Information on how to change the existing power structure is deliberately hidden from citizens by the power structure itself, particularly in authoritarian societies.  Thus, even citizens who want to change the system fall back onto hackneyed and often ineffectual actions: protest rallies, sign-waving, petitions.

This is not to say that the collaborative action made possible by the network never succeeds, but when it does it is the result of sophisticated strategy that gives citizens a meaningful action to take part in.   One of the clearest examples of this is the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, a long-shot at the beginning of the primaries who became the favorite to win through the creation and exquisite execution of a brilliant mix of insider (delegates) and outsider (organizers), online (MyBO, donations) and offline (caucusing, house parties) strategy.  (Disclaimer: I was an employee of the campaign).  The fact that Barack Obama’s election does not seem revolutionary is only a testimony to its success.  What was previously unimaginable is now normal. But the edge case of the Obama campaign is of little relevance to most movements.   They are merely groups of citizens.  They have no background in strategy and are likely to reiterate tactics they have seen in the media without understanding the logic behind them.  If they do something creative and effective it is often a result of guess-work.

Post Script: Re-Engineering Activism for the Network

In a recent article, “Against Transparency”,  digital entrepreneur and activist Lawrence Lessig wrote that the “nature of digital is perfect copies freely made.”  At the most fundamental level, these copies – of web pages, videos, songs, text – are the content which flows through the network.  If this is the nature of the network, the challenge for people who want to encourage more effective digital activism is to figure out which content will both assist activists in creating effective campaigns and which can be disseminated most effectively online.

A few days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the launch of Civil Society 2.0, a grants program to deploy experienced technologists around the world to assist civil society organizations.   The content of the program is 2.0, but its modus operandi is 1.0. Deploying physical resources around the world to create custom solutions is the antithesis of digital.  It is not “perfect copies freely made.”  It is “original content created at great cost.”

The holy grail in this field is not technical assistance.  It is finding the content that will be useful to activists that can be digitized (valuable in “perfect copy” format to a range of activists) and updated seemlessly (guides, a relic of the paper era, are easily digitized but become obsolete in months).

This is what I am seeking: digital content that not only inspires and directs citizens to act, but also tells them how to act. For too long the focus has been on content dissemination and collective action over the network, but this is only 2/3 of the solution to effective digital activism.  The content – the how – has still not been successfully digitized.   We need to re-engineer activism for the network, or at least re-engineer the way we spread knowledge about activism.  We need to find a new and better way to spread the how.   Fortunately, the digital network was made for such tasks.  It is up to us to find the solution.

image: Dreamscape Photographs/Flickr

In NY-23, a rural congressional district in the north of the state, conservative grassroots activists are organizing a nationwide campaign to get a Conservative party candidate into office, this in a district that has sent a Republican to Congress consistently since the 19th century.   Conservative activists across the country, ignoring the central organization of the Republican party, began sending massive amounts of online donations to the Conservative party candidate, Dough Hofffman, and attacking the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava.  In part because of the gap in fundraising, Scozzafava suspended her campaign on Saturday and threw her support to the Democratic candidate, further enraging grassroots activists.

When I attended the Personal Democracy Forum in New York last June Mark Pesce, a futurist and pioneer in virtual reality, spoke about the tension between vertical and horizontal power structures that the Internet was producing.   He gave the example of the Church of Scientology (vertical hierarchy) vs. Wikipedia (horizontal collaboration).  The case of the New York election is even more interesting as the Republican Party (vertical hierarchy) tries unsuccessfully to organize or control conservative activists (horizontal collaboration).

It is more interesting because it is political, and shows us the possible re-balancing of power made possible by an internet that allows for quick resource transfer and accumulation (online donations) and organizing through alternative broadcast channels (conservative blogs).   And, unlike the Obama campaign, which used these tactics as part of a top-down campaign that included grassroots participation, the national conservative movement is truly beyond the control of the political institution of the American right: the Republican party.

It is a sign of power shifts to come, with all the chaos  associated with democracy.  It is also not clear whether these citizen actions are beneficial, either for the citizens organizing them, the other citizens of New York state, or for America.  Is this movement a sign of the potential empowerment of all citizens through similar tactics or an example of a minority empowering itself to the detriment of the majority?  A pluralistic nonviolent power environment where citizens can successful challenge political institutions might be advantageous in an authoritarian regime when the government holds an abusive monopoly on power, but in a state like the US, where power is more evenly apportioned, are these movements beneficial to the political whole?   In both cases, a disruption of the current political structure occurs, which can have both positive and negative outcomes.  I am eager to see the next case study in the story of the networked power shift and see how this trend develops.

The Knowledge Loop: How Digital Activism Improves

Digital activism is nothing more than a series of practices and our interpretations of those practices.  Digital activism practitioners (Doer group) use a Facebook group to organize, publicize a cause on Twitter, create a group blog.  These activities are at the heart of digital activism, but our perceptions of this field are formed in large part by the interpretations put forth by the Thinkers (mainstream media, bloggers, trainers, scholars).  These interpretations in turn influence our practices, particularly in the case of an influential Thinker.  I call this feedback cycle of practice > interpretation > new practice the digital activism knowledge cycle and in order to explain it I will use the examples of two bloggers: cyber-optimist and digital activism promoter Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog, and cyber-pessimist and digital activism critic Evgeny Morozov of Net Effects.   Each approach to interpreting digital activism implies a different future for the field.

Beth’s Blog is probably the most widely-read and respected blog on social media use for nonprofits.  A couple of weeks ago, Beth wrote a post on how nonprofits can improve blogger outreach.    I’ll use this post to illustrate the digital activism knowledge loop: outreach practices occur, Beth observes outreach and writes post making recommendations for improvement, some nonprofits read this post and implement her improvements leading the new practices, then the cycle begins again.

In this example, digital activism is validated and the goal of interpretation is to improve that practices of activists and advocates.  Negative interpretations of digital activism have their effects as well.  Evgeny Morozov is a well-known critic of digital activism.  His widely-read blog, Net Effects, focuses on the destructive and ineffective aspects of digital activism:  the “spinternet” of government propaganda, cyberwars, and ineffectual online “slacktivism.” Evgeny is an excellent analyst of the political uses of the Internet and his arguments on these issues are sound.  Nevertheless, because of the influence of these ideas, there is the potential for self-fulfilling prophecy.  If funders, nonprofits, and activists read these negative posts and come to see the digital activism as primarily a realm of manipulation, crime, and ineffectiveness, funders will be less likely to pay for digital activism trainings and nonprofits and activists will be less likely to use digital activism in their campaigns.

In a recent post on slacktivism, Evgeny finished his critique with recommendations for making activism more effective.  I hope Evgeny and critics like him will use their influence to make digital activism more effective rather than simply dismissing it.  Either future is possible.   This is the power of the interpretation step in the knowledge loop and of the Thinker group.   Activists (the Doers) make decisions on technology use based on knowledge of the practices of other Doers which they gain from the interpretation of the Thinkers.  Some digital activism practices work and some fail utterly, for a variety of reasons.  There is no doubt of that.  However, if these failures are interpreted by the Thinkers as opportunities for improvement then Doers will be inspired to change their tactics and try again.  If Thinkers interpret these failures as signed of the inherently flawed nature of digital activism, then Doers may abandon the practice, leading to a withering of digital activism, despite its potential.  Through our action, we will create the future, and it will depend on our current beliefs.

Knowledge Ecology: Intellectuals, Trainers, & Media

Of course, bloggers are only a part of the larger knowledge ecology.   There are many other actors that determine how digital activism will evolve in the future.  According to the framework laid out in the first post of this series, the actors that make up the field of digital activism is made of Doers (practitioners), Thinkers (interpreters), and  Builders (creators of infrastructure).    There are multiple types of actors in each group, as show in the graphic at left.   Though knowledge passes through all actor groups, the principal conduits are not surprisingly in the the Thinker group, particularly Public Intellectuals, Trainers/Consultants, and the Mainstream Media.   Bloggers like Beth Kanter and Evgeny Morozov fall in the Public Intellectual group (Beth is equally well-known as a trainer).  Public Intellectuals absorb and interpret both the practices they observe (as shown in the knowledge loop graphic above) and the interpretations produced by other Thinkers, be they scholars, entrepreneurs, members of the mainstream media, or other bloggers.  Public Intellectuals interpret this information for consumption for all three groups.  Sometimes this information is simply re-consumed by the Thinker group, creating closed loops of elite knowledge.  Ideally, as in the case of Beth’s Blog, knowledge is interpreted to be accessible to Doers and thus improves practice.  Let’s look more closely at the other two important knowledge conduits: Trainers/Consultants, and the Media.

Trainers and Consultants can be considered together since their profession is knowledge transition to practitioners.  They differ in that trainers tend to create generalized solutions for groups whereas consultants created customized solutions for individual clients.  Also, trainers tend to focus on transmitting their own knowledge to the client/trainee, whereas the assumption in hiring a consultant is that the knowledge differential between consultant and client will remain largely intact and the client will pay the consultant for using their intellectual property to create solutions to technology problems identified by the client.  The knowledge flows between Trainers/Consultants and clients in the Doer group are shown below.  The width of the line refers to the amount of knowledge transmission and the size of the arrow refers to the relative direction of the flow.

NOTE: The Entrepreneur group has been removed to clarify the relationships in this diagram

As you can see from the diagram above, one of the principle differences between Trainers and Consultants is who they share their knowledge with.  Trainers are most likely to work with nonprofits, while Consultants are also likely to work with political campaigns.  Neither group is likely to work with grassroots activists because most grassroots activists do not have the financial resources to attend a training and certainly not to hire a consultant.  It is very rare for a political campaign to hire a general trainer and trainings occurs in the political tech realm mostly through non-profits like the New Organizing Institute, which seek to generally build capacity for progressive candidates in the US.  In addition to gaining knowledge from their experiences with clients (indicated by the size of the arrow tips), both groups also gain information from public intellectuals and the media.

Trainers and Consultants are key conduits of knowledge on how to use digital tools for campaigning, but their reach is limited by hard financial constraints.  While the cost for participation is lower for a training that to hire a consultant, activists who receive the benefit of this kind of knowledge dissemination either have their own funds available to pay for the Trainer/Consultant’s time or are selected by a donor to receive the funding.  This leaves most grassroots activists out in the cold.

By far the largest conduit of knowledge about digital activism is the mainstream media (MSM) : TV, radio, and print.  The MSM is the principal source of information on digital activism to the general public and also influences the ideas of Doers, Builders, and the other members of the Thinker group.  Though there is some value gained by these groups from reading MSM accounts of digital activism, the principle flow of knowledge and value is out of the digital activism ecosystem.  Journalists package tales of digital activism as entertaining vignettes for the general public, not to increase knowledge or understanding of the field.  Most stories come from the field of grassroots activism (think of the “Twitter Revolution” stories from Moldova and Iran).  Some, like reports of Barack Obama’s online fundraising prowess (disclaimer: former staffer), are about politics, but most political campaigns get no press about their web efforts.  Most ignored are the thousands of social media campaigns run by nonprofits and advocacy campaigns, few of which are able to successful hook the news cycle.  Journalists who cover digital activism are rarely experts in the topic (it is a new field, after all) and are thus likely to misinterpret what they are seeing. Even when they seek commentary from those in the Public Intellectuals category, they may not know who to ask and may print the quote that best fits their story or that gives the most controversial interpretation.

There is certainly a value to mainstream media coverage of digital activism: unlike all the other Thinkers,the MSM has a massive reach and thus can critically raise awareness of digital activism among the global public.  Awareness of digital activism is the first step towards participation in it.  However, the mainstream media does not disseminate actionable information to digital activism practitioners, not that it is even trying to.

How to Move Digital Activism Forward

In order to move digital activism forward by increasing adoption of effective digital activism practices, I recommend the following steps:

1. Create a Knowledge Loop Beyond Tools: In order to disseminate best practices of digital activism, we must first determine what they are.  We need to make the knowledge loop more effective. There are several great people in the Thinker category interpreting activism best practices from a tools perspective (how to use Twitter, how to use Facebook), but few are looking at the underlying dynamics: the common characteristics that unite disparate tools, the strategies for which tools are incidental and interchangeable.  The tools perspective traps both Thinkers and Doers in an eternal race to evaluate the constant barrage of web-based applications that rise and fall in prominence at a dizzying speed.   By showing the forest beyond the trees, an understanding of the underlying mechanics of digital activism would allow all groups to more effectively evaluate new tools and improve their implementation of digital activism.
2. Better Dissemination of Best Practices: In the current knowledge ecology, the way most activists learn about digital activism is through a news story, a training, or a colleague or friend.  All three methods are limited: the first because of the shallowness of analysis and the lack of actionable advice, the second because of prohibitive cost and the difficulty of scaling, and the third because the colleague or friend is also unlikely to have high-quality information.  Once broad guidelines of best practices have been developed, both new and existing networks media and peer networks need to be leveraged to disseminate this information.
3. Connect Activists:  This post focuses primarily on how Doers are informed by Thinkers, yet in order to truly scale digital activism, we need both strong dissemination networks for getting information to activists, and strong peer networks for activists to share information with one another.  While these networks already exist among nonprofit organizations in the rich world (I am thinking of networks like NTEN), these networks are lacking in many other countries not only for financial but also for security reasons.  Repressive regimes where effective digital activism is most needed are the most likely to stamp out even incipient knowledge-sharing networks.  The solution will not be through large hubs and centralized solutions like Sesawe, but through a thousand shadow networks that shift location to evade detection.  New technology platforms may be needed to build these networks, which must be free, light, secure, and easy to operate.
4. Let’s get together: Where are we going?  The future of digital activism could move in many different directions.  In our current state we are divided.  Not only are we using different terminology to talk about what we are doing, knowledge is cordoned by financial limits on the scalability of dissemination.  Knowledge sources that have scale lack depth (the mainstream media) and knowledge sources that have depth lack scale (niche blogs, trainers and consultants).  Only if all actors in the field come together – Doers, Thinkers, Builders – and agree to work together will we succeed.  There are many ways to come together – an organization, a conference, even a listserv.  The key is to see a common task.  There are many futures of digital activism.  Our opponents are working strategically to oppose us through misinformation, censorship, and financial superiority.   Will we unite to create the digital activism future we want to see?

The Social Construction of Digital Activism

When I started writing about digital activism in that first post, I ignored the elephant in the  room: not everyone agrees that the use of digital tools for social and political change should be called “digital activism.”  In fact, there is quite a difference of opinion. Wiebe Bijker, chair of the Department of Social Science & Technology at the University of Maastricht, has an elegant little term for the state of affairs we find ourselves in at the present moment: “interpretive flexibility.” Graeme Kirkpatrick of the University of Manchester describes the phenomenon excellently in his short volume Technology & Social Power, so I’ll just quote him:

…Writing the social history of an artefact in constructionist terms involves identifying a series of steps or phases in its development.  First, it will be possible to identify one or more relevant social groups who participate in defining the artefact, constituting it as a meaningful object and picking out certain of its possibilities.  These groups will then be found to differ over its correct interpretation.  Prototypes will be made and circulated, various possibilities will be discussed and there will be a dispute over such issues as what the thing could or should be used for, who should be allowed to use it and what design best meets these needs.  During this time the artifact is said to have “interpretive flexibility”… its meaning-significance is open to be negotiated and contested by relevant social groups.

So, the meaning of an artifact (in this case the practice of using digital tools for campaigning) is defined by relevant social groups (the Doers, Builders, and Thinkers and sub-roles defined in the first post) who go through a period of contestation (now) to define what the artifact/practices means.

Accumulated Mind Share in Digital Activism

Digital activism’s period of interpretative flexibility is most obviously visible in the differences in the terminology used to define it.  In the two images below I seek to map “mind share” – the difference of awareness and attention to different terms used to conceptualize the use of digital technology for activism. The list of terms I examined isn’t exhaustive, but I think I have included all the important ones.

I’ve done this examination of mind share using two methods, and each revealed a very different mind map.  The first map shows accumulated mind share.  The proxy variable here number of results from a Google search for a given term.  I call this map accumulated mind share since it captures all information about technology activism recorded online, at any time.  In each case I searched for the term in quotes and included appropriate permutations (ie e-advocacy and eadvocacy) to get the most accurate number of hits.  The size of the bubble reflects the number of hits on each term.

On the accumulation map eActivism is the big winner with over 2.5 million results.  Next is information activism, with just over 600,000, cyberactivism with 131,000, and social media for social change with 160,000.  Online activism and online organizing have about 65,000 each and all the other terms (mobile activism, internet activism e-advocacy) have less than 50,000.  Digital activism has the smallest mind share by this measure with only 19,400 results.

Based on this map, we should all start using the term eActivism and be done with it, but the accumulated measure of mind share ignores one important factor: time relevance.  eActivism, along with the less popular e-advocacy, is a bi-product of the first wave of awareness of the use of digital technology for activism during the Web 1.0 era.   It’s no coincidence that the terms sounds like a portemanteau of “activism” and “email.”   (Read this 1993 article from The Nation to get an idea of what digital activism was like  in that period, the term “modem” appears often.)  Another popular term on this map, cyberactivism, has origins that are perhaps even older than eActivism.  It is a portemanteau of “activism” and “cyberspace,” the latter a term coined by the science fiction author Willian Gibson in 1982.

Current Mind Share in Digital Activism

Because of the accumulated popularity of a term does not reveal its current relevance, I decided to use another metric for currency: mentions on Twitter.  Like doing a Google search, a Twitter search is reasonably proxy for mind share as the people thinking about digital activism are likely to be engaged in popular online platforms and to record their thoughts in a digital medium.  The Twitter mind share map reveals a popularity ranking that is quite different than Google.

In this map, hypotheses about the lack of currency of popular Google terms like cyberactivism and eActivism are borne out.   In a random week (the past seven days) the former term was mentioned in one tweet ans the latter in 2.  By contrast, digital activism – relatively unpopular on Google – is relatively popular on Twitter, with 65 tweets.  Based on its current relevance, its lack of popularity on Google is more likely a reflection of its newness, rather than a lack of relevance.  The term first appears in blog posts in 2006.

The term that performs the best in the combined rankings is “social media for social change”, a term that also began in blog posts in 2006 and then gained significant traction.  It refers to the use of the use of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs in change campaigns and has its own tag on Twitter, #4change.  Not surprisingly, given its focus, social media for social change is the most popular conceptualization of technology activism on Twitter by far.  It also has the third-highest number of mentions on Google as well, and thus has both accumulated and current mind share.

Different Terms, Different Meanings

So, should we ditch the other terms and all start talking about social media for social change?  Not quite.  There is one last factor in the analysis of mind share: the meaning of terms.  There are two reasons for confusions of meaning.  The first is that people are using different words to talk about the same thing.  As blogger and social media entrepreneur Gaurav Mishra wrote in a post about the 4 C’s of social media, “different thinkers and practitioners use different terms to describe similar tools and practices.”  The second problem is that there are differences in the meanings of terms, but they are subtle.

The goal of the graphic below is to clear the air, to show which terms are synonymous, which are merely connected and, if so, the nature of those connections.  The size of the bubbles is determined by how many other categories fall within each term and overlap indicates that a practice falls within more than one category.  For example, using a Facebook group to attract participants to a protest is both internet activism, online organizing, and using social media for social change.

In order to find common ground, I made the divisions above based on the objective practices they describe.  Even though internet activism, online activism, and cyberactivism reflect different perceptions of the internet and different cultural moments, they all refer to activism carried out using the international computer-based network we call the internet.

Most of the other terms refer to types of internet activism.  Online organizing refers to internet activism that seeks to mobilize supporters in order to achieve a certain campaign outcome.  Social media for social change refers to a type of online activism that uses social networking platforms.  Because of the increasing permeability between internet and mobile due to internet-based mobile platforms like Twitter and internet-enabled smart phones, there is also some overlap between social media for social change and mobile activism.

The broadest categories are digital activism, e-Activism, and e-Advocacy.  Digital activism is the narrowest of the three because it pre-supposes that there is some special spreadability in the universality of digital applications that makes them particularly effective for activism, while e-Activism and e-Advocacy define themselves based on the broader range of electric “e” technologies, not limited to those that are specifically digital.  The interesting outlier here is information activism, the practice of using information and communication technologies to further activist goals.  While much information activism takes place online, some does not, in the cases of flyers, posters, and analogue films.

How Can We Discuss if We’re Not Speaking the Same Language?

In his framework, Wiebe Bijker proposes that a technological frame must exist exist before the period of interpretive flexibility can begin.  According to Kirkpatrick, the technological frame is a common definition of what the object is that ensures that “as an artifact is discussed and passes through the period of interpretive flexibility.. people are not simply talking past one another.”  Unfortunately, we have reached the the period of interpretative flexibility – is digital activism for good? is it value neutral? is it irrelevant? – without have a common terminology to discuss the topic.  If we were linguists we would say that we are engaged in a semiotic process of connecting signs (words) to meaning.

In any case, we cannot move forward in the important process of determining what digital activism is and what its significance may be until we have a shared vocabulary to talk about these issues.   Perhaps a stakeholder meeting is in order where these issues can be hashed out by members of the three groups – Doers, Builders, and Thinkers – who define digital activism.    Is it possible to socially engineer the semiotic process? Probably.

In the next post I will attack the question “where are we going?” by analyzing knowledge flows (and miscommunications) among the different actor groups.  It is only through the swift and effective communication of practice and meaning among Thinkers, Builders, and Doers that digital activism will progress as an idea and as a practice.

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.

Author

Colin Delany

Subject

This book explores the communication strategy of the Obama presidential election campaign in the United States during 2008.

From an outsider’s view (I have never lived in the United States), I was amazed at how the Obama election campaign mobilised supporters. However, I have to admit to having suffered Obama fatigue by the end of it all: it seemed that everybody with a blog or Twitter account had an expert opinion on how Obama won his campaign.

Colin Delany is an exception. He has written many posts on political campaigning over several years, and he has done an exceptional job at summarizing the key elements of the campaign’s communication strategy that contributed to Obama’s success in his book “Learning from Obama: Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond”.

One salient point Delany makes about the Obama campaign is that while the bulk of fundraising came from online activities, most funds were spent on television advertising, because it is the best way to communicate with the uncommitted and uninvolved. The call to action on television advertising was usually to go online for more information, thereby increasing the campaign’s online network of supporters.

This point is particularly important for us as digital activists to bear in mind. While we may often have a big impact using online tools, traditional communication methods we can still change people’s minds and actions.

[Full Disclosure: DigiActive co-founder Mary Joyce was an employee of the Obama campaign, but did not play a part in the selection of this topic.]