DigiActive.org

Defining Digital Activism: Part 2 – What Are We (Thinking)?

On Wednesday I began a series of posts defining digital activism through Gauguin’s three existential questions: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”.  That first post tackled the question of where we come from.  I identified three groups that are responsible for the creation of digital activism as an idea and a practice: Doers that carry out campaigns, Builders that create the infrastructure of digital activism, and Thinkers that process information about what digital activism is and how to do it well. In this second post of the series I will address the second question, “What are we?” or, to be more specific, “What are we thinking?”

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.

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. Read more »

The Perils of Facebook Activism: Walled Gardens, Serial Activists and Hackers

I have written before about the brilliant Pink Chaddi Campaign and highlighted the important role played by Facebook in helping the campaign go viral.

Briefly, journalist Nisha Susan set up The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook and urged women to gift pink panties to Pramod Mutalik, the head of the ultra-conservative Hindu group Shri Ram Sena, in order to shame him into backing down from his threats to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations.

The campaign has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.

The Pink Chaddi Facebook Group has been getting hacked throughout last month, and, instead of dealing with the hackers, Facebook suspended both the group and Nisha’s account last week.

Before the group was suspended, the hackers changed the name of the group to ‘A Good Bong is a Dead Bong’ and posted vulgar and violent messages on the group. Over the month, the hackers had used names like ‘Nathuram Godse Appreciation Society’, ‘Dara Singh Appreciation Group’ and other vulgar names.

In an open letter to Facebook posted on Kafila, Nisha wondered if the first rule of Facebook activism is to not use Facebook.

In an update on the Pink Chaddi blog, Nisha warned her supporters against joining a fake Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women group created by the hackers.

In fact, several groups supporting and impersonating the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women have sprung up on Facebook.

While Facebook activism has become an important part of any activist’s technology toolkit, it comes with its own perils.

To begin with, Facebook allows you very little flexibility in changing the design of your cause, group, page or event. Each of these options come with in-built limitations and once you have chosen one, you are wedded to it.

Facebook also gives you very little control over the content created by you or your supporters. For instance, you can’t highlight wall messages as important or sticky and you can’t export them.

Most importantly, you can’t export the names or contact details of your supporters, so the support base you build within Facebook stays within Facebook.

Then, there is the question of the involvement of your Facebook supporters. Ethan Zuckerman has wondered if Facebook protests are glorified petitions that attract serial activists. Beth Kanter has written about the difficulty of moving casual Facebook activists to higher levels of engagement.

We have also seen in the case of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement that Facebook activism groups come together for a specific protest, but lose the momentum thereafter.

Finally, there are serious security concerns associated with Facebook protests which have become all too clear in the case of the Pink Chaddi campaign.

Facebook groups can be hacked into, in spite of reasonable security measures, and the Facebook team is often not responsive to pleas of redressal. The FACThai Blog had written about the possibility of such attacks on the Pink Chaddi group last month and now, the attacks have really gone out of control.

Beyond the threat of hacking, detractors or even well meaning supporters can create duplicate groups, pages, causes, or events with similar sounding names, leading to confusion and a dilution of message.

So, if you are an activist, do leverage the virality of Facebook, but use it with an eye on its many limitations.

By all means, use Facebook as part of your campaign but don’t build your campaign around it. Use all the social media tools at your disposal and interlink them to increase their virality. In the US, it would mean using Facebook with MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. In India it would mean using at least Orkut, apart from Facebook.

Whichever tool you use, have a plan to transition your supporters to a traditional mailing list, so that you have more control over how you communicate with them. If you have been able to build a large and vibrant community, it might even make sense to move to a proprietary social network built on Drupal or Ning. I’m not implying that such a transition will be easy, or even successful, but it’s definitely worth a try.

Finally, do take basic security precautions like using strong passwords and changing them often, logging out of public computers after using them, and having more than one admin so that the group is not orphaned if your account gets hacked.

If your Facebook account, and your group, does get hacked, I guess the first step will be to try the Forgot Your Password? link, which will send the new password to your email ID, unless the hacker has already changed it.

If that doesn’t work, your next resort should be the Login Problems Help Page,which will lead you to one of two forms based on whether you have or don’t have access to your login email.

If you are lucky, the Facebook support team will respond quickly, otherwise you would do well to quickly move on to step three, and start an online campaign to put pressure on Facebook to restore your access.

Coming back to the Pink Chaddi Campaign, Nisha Susan has taken all these three steps and still doesn’t have access to her Facebook group.

If you know a way to help Nisha regain control of the Facebook group and avoid such hacking attacks in the future, do leave a comment below.

I’m convinced that someone should write a blog post titled “three steps to get your hacked Facebook activism group back”. Perhaps, we can write that post together here.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Campaign: Blogging for Land Rights in China

Chinese Translator’s note: I have submitted the following blog post on behalf of Digiactive.org’s China correspondent, Zola Zhou. The Chinese text from Zola’s original post is displayed in the image below the translation. Additions to the original text are marked in brackets.

After the Reform and Opening policy began to dramatically alter China’s economy at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, the country has undergone an almost unfathomable transformation. One of the most striking areas of change has been in real estate development. Old neighborhoods have been razed to make way for office towers and seemingly endless rows of high rise apartment buildings.

Many of China’s booming middle class citizens, who still remain in the minority on a national scale, have eagerly taken residence in 21st century China’s urban comfort. This onslaught of development has also caused hardship for countless families and individuals that have been left behind or pushed aside to make way for “progress.”

Knocking down a house in Sipingfang, to the left, officials are beating up a young girl and child (red circle).

Description: In the town of Sipingfang, in China’s Hunan Province, residents have found Zhou Shu Guang [the author], who has helped them establish a website to preserve their rights: www.sifangping.com. Moreover, Zhou provided two days of in-home instruction to teach them how to use the blog process to publish articles that introduce their circumstances. Residents of Sifangping hope that this website can become a bargaining chip in negotiations with the government to acquire reasonable compensation rates.

Digital activism tool: Blog

How These Tools Are Being Used: Given that domestic Chinese media never provides coverage on issues of residence demolitions and relocation, citizens affected by these activities frequently have no way to appeal to higher authorities in a court setting to acquire reasonable compensation [for land appropriated by the government]. Therefore, they are left with no other choice but to publish their stories online. They hope that this website will be viewed by more people, and that they can become model resisters against forced relocation. This web site has an international domain name and the mainframe is located in America, thus the Chinese government is unable to delete it.

Outcome: [No word yet on whether the blog is helping the residents of Sipingfang gain better compensation for appropriated land.]

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