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Defining Digital Activism: Part 3 – Where Are We Going?

So we come to the end of our journey  (well, this series anyway).  We’ve answered the first two of Gauguin’s existential questions.  In the first post we asked “Where do we come from?” and realized we’re Builders, Doers, and Thinkers (graphic below).  In the second post we investigated “What are We (Thinking)?” and found we operate in a mish-mash of terminology that make effective discussion of technology and activism difficult.  Now we come to the final question: “Where are we going?”  This is the most interesting question and also the most perilous, as prognostication always is. Rather than attempting to look into the crystal ball only two be proved wrong in three years (or three months), I’ll talk about the factors that will determine the future of digital activism: what activists actually do and what people think about those action.

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. Read more »

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 »

DigiActive’s Introduction to Digital Activism

It’s been a long time in coming, but here is DigiActive’s official introduction to digital activism.  This short presentation (19 slides) includes the following content:

• definition of digital activism
• examples from 3 countries (Colombia, Pakistan, China) including 3 different tools (social networks, mobile SMS, blogs)
• qualities of good digital activism: sustainability, effectiveness, reproducibility
• challenges to digital activism: the need for online-offline coordination, elitism and inequality of access, hype and tool transience, and persecution of digital activists
• what DigiActive does in this space and ways to get involved

Like all DigiActive content, the presentation is created under a Creative Commons Attribution License, so we encourage you to download it, use it, and remix it with your own content.  You can download the presentation here.