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Social Media for Social Change in the 1800’s
Written by Mary Joyce on November 9, 2009 – 6:55 pm -
A massive system of human rights abuse is occurring in the United States. Activists, intent on putting a human face on the mass tragedy, appropriate photographs of victims and disseminate them through their social networks. Soon the mainstream media catches on, furthering the outcry. The year is 1863 and the human right abuse is slavery.
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.
Tags: 4change, nptech, slavery, social media, USA
Posted in Americas, Campaigns, Theory | 5 Comments »
Party Politics: Twittering towards Palin 2012?
Written by Tiby Kantrowitz on July 19, 2009 – 12:29 pm -
Following former American vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s announcement that she would resign as governor of Alaska, Palin-related sites have strongly increased in traffic and membership. Amid speculations about her reasons for resigning in the middle of her term of office, and a vagueness about her future plans on her main site, supporters advance Palin as a candidate for the 2012 presidential elections.
Tools: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Ning groups, blogs, Wordpress
How the tools are being used:
Palin-related digital outreach stretches back to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain choosing her as his running mate in the 2008 election. Since then, online tools have been used to communicate messages more directly to supporters, to acquire funds for both her political action committee (PAC) and for her legal defense fund, and to shape the beginnings of a movement towards advancing her for candidacy for the Presidency.
With over 442 updates and over 102,000 followers (increasing even at time of press), Palin’s Twitter usage (via Twitterberry and the web) and style mirrors the strategic rhetoric of her speech as voiced in her resignation announcement. Recent tweets promise
“I’ll stay in touch w/whomever wants via personal twtr site;launch July 26;in meantime it’s pleasure to update interested folks on State biz!” and
“elected is replaceable;Ak WILL progress! + side benefit=10 dys til less politically correct twitters fly frm my fingertps outside State site.”
Her current handle, “AKGOVSarahPalin,” whose profile links to the Alaskan state government website, will be retired once she steps down. As part of a movement-building strategy, using Twitter builds community by creating a feeling of immediacy and fostering a sense of insider knowledge. This contributes towards preparing the way for whatever steps she chooses to take next.
Through social networks such as Team Sarah (almost 72,000 members) and blogs like Conservatives4Palin the movement has increased membership and raised funds in actions such as a week-long WebaThon carried out in June to raise money for the Sarah Palin Legal Defense Fund. 
Palin and her team created The Alaska Fund Trust to help allay legal expenses incurred defending herself from a series of ethics charges. While legal defense funds are nothing new, Palin’s fund differs from those of other political candidates in having an online presence. The fund’s site lists PDFs of legal documents on six other political defense funds for comparison. Whatever their other similarities or differences, none of the others had the backing of an online presence or community. Putting all activities online makes it easier for other online groups to organize activities in support of them.
For example, Conservatives4Palin.com’s attempt to raise the entire $500,000 requested by the defense fund was also its first attempt at grassroots political fundraising. Daily updates on the main site, viral video that attracted some news attention, emails and blog-postings, along with some limited support from well-known radio personalities who posted links, all helped to create momentum for the week-long effort. The campaign successfully increased traffic to the Conservatives4Palin site, leading to a high of over 495,000 pageviews for June, ’09 and nearly doubled the number of site visits from the previous month.
(Courtesy of Alexa)
However, the site was ultimately unsuccessful in raising the full amount. The comments section mentions raising $109,620 over six days. Ultimately, lack of coordination with other prominent and well-organized sites such as Team Sarah, was cited in the comments section as one reason for not raising more money. Attention expected from prominent supportive journalists either did not come or arrived too late.”
With so many different Palin-related social networks, blogs, and websites, as well as conversations about Palin on other conservative sites, Sarah Palin Web Brigade, formerly the Sarah Palin Internet Coalition, was established “to facilitate communication and coordinate efforts between the many Internet-based groups that support Sarah Palin.” Currently, the site has 17 groups, most of which are dedicated to Internet communications strategies, but only one group has seen traffic within the last month.
Members are highly interactive, and Team Sarah has a specific group whose mission is to post immediate greetings on new members pages in an effort to retain membership and encourage participation. Currently, the social network has 71,870 members and 764 groups on its network, of which the featured 30 groups show activity within the last two weeks.
Some groups post discrete actions members can perform online, such as making donations, signing petitions, or offering videos or banners that they can watch or post on their personal sites. Forums post information on the latest online as well as offline activities such as rallies, parties and marches.
Analysis:
According to one Pew Internet & American Life Report, during the election cycle Obama supporters had a higher level of engagement in online digital media. Following the election, however, recognizing that difference groups in support of Palin are experimenting with ways of communicating about the issues. In contrast, as recently as a February post announcing the GOP Tech Summit, commenters on the Republican Party’s site expressed their dissatisfaction with the site’s failure to provide information on important political issues.
At the same time that Democrats were ultimately more successful in using digital tools for advocacy McCain supporters were more likely to use the Internet in general. Now however, when people search for political information online they look for opinions and views similar to their own, rather than alternative or challenging ones.
(Courtesy of Pew Internet & American Life Project)
This provides Palin supporters with a clear opportunity to begin their efforts early, with a limited message, i.e. one person, rather than an entire party and to be able to stay relatively on message while refining their methodology in the process. This contrasts sharply versus the efforts of the Republican Party, which must promote a multitude of messages while battling the digital activism learning curve.
Based upon an exploration of the different groups and the activity within them, the nascent Palin campaign is quickly accelerating in confidence and skill at using digital media. Its offline strength has been its ability to reach people individually, and on an emotional level. Online, it seeks to do the same. Certainly, as a non-organized group without a real platform, the Palin campaign is freer than the Republican Party to make mistakes. However, because of its lack of organization it is also gaining valuable experience in how to build traction online. As it gets closer to 2012 this could make a vital distinction in who becomes the next President of the United States, not just who becomes the leading Conservative voice.
Tags: 2012, elections, Palin, twitter activism, USA
Posted in Americas, Blogs, Social Networks, Tactics, Tools | 2 Comments »
21st Century Segregation: Google Reviews and an e-Boycott
Written by Carlos on July 15, 2009 – 1:10 am -Background: On July 9, news broke on NBC Philadelphia that the Valley Swim Club had discriminated against summer camp groups because they had African-American members. The campers were asked to leave the club when they came to use the pool and their money was refunded.
The President of the Valley Swim Club responded with the following video:
Swim_Club_President_Talks__Racial_Comments.html
Swim_Club_President_Talks__Gives_Apology.html
The club sustains that the children were turned away due to overcrowding, not racial composition.
How these tools are being used: This club was listed in Google Maps as a business, but did not have any reviews until the controversy. Now it has over 125 reviews, with the overwhelming majority being negative reviews. A pattern emerged were positive reviews were voted down, and negative reviews voted up. This is a new type of boycott, where a business is targeted through their online presence on Google, one of the most popular crowd-sourced business review sites.
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- Screen capture from Google Maps reviews
In addition, the reviews were used to convey useful information, in the style usually reserved for Twitter or blogs. For example, one comment seems to support the arguments of both sides of the controversy: there probably was no racial animosity on the part of the management but that the lack of racism the management claims is probably disingenuous:
I worked here for about a month and I really liked the people and the place was always clean and organized, but I can tell you that the surrounding community is generally racist. The management of the club was surely under pressure from the majority of their customers, and no, I’m not excusing them at all. This is not uncommon is this particular community… you will find the same thing in local bars and stores. African Americans followed, neglected or otherwise harassed until they leave). I wish I could give them a higher rating, but there’s no excuse for racism in these supposedly enlightened times.
http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=118012252010721318550&hl=en&gl=us
As a result of the controversy, the club blanked their website with a brief statement denying the affair. However their website, including contact information, is archived in the Wayback Machine, and so this information was made available in forums and other social internet media.
Analysis: I think it is an interesting use of Google Reviews, and while there doesn’t seem to be any organized effort, and that this is entirely impromptu, there might be a lesson here to future activist efforts around boycotts. In particular, the voting pattern is very similar to that of social-bookmarking sites like Digg, were activists for Ron Paul and Barack Obama consistently managed to get their candidate’s articles to the featured page – which means that the experiences from social-bookmarking can be applied to e-boycotts in social-review sites.
I also found it very interesting as a creative use of technology the use of the reviews to convey information, there might be lessons here for activists facing lack of social tools due to access constraints.
Screen Capture of the Wayback Machine search
Lastly, in an already classic move, the club deleted their page with a statement, but online communities quickly found and disseminated the archived version in the ever handy Wayback Machine. There is an old lesson here: once out in the web, in all probability it cannot be undone – all one has to do is look.
Valley Swim Club's webpage from archive
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Tags: Google Maps, racism, segregation, USA, Valley Swim Club, waybackmachine
Posted in Americas, Campaigns, Discussion Boards, Mashups | No Comments »
Tool: push out your content with widgets
Written by Mary Joyce on May 19, 2009 – 6:07 pm -
Tool: the widget
Tool Description: A widget is a piece of HTML code that can be embedded into a blog or web site to display content from another source. For example, the widget on the left, from the American site http://jobs.change.org, pulls content about recent social change job postings from the Change.org database and displays them on this page. Other widgets which work in the same way include event count-down clocks and DigiActive’s comment and Twitter feeds, which you’ll find on our left and right-hand toolbars.
Activist Application: As activists, we are often looking to bring useful content to our web sites in order to attract readers or to push out content we have created to other platforms so we can get as many “eyes” on that content as possible. According Danny Moldovan of Jobs for Change, “Our goal is to spark a nationwide movement toward careers in the common good.” Their methods for achieving this goal is to bring together lots of these jobs in a single place (their site) and then send job-seekers to that site. If they can push out these job posting to other sites and blogs through their “featured jobs” widget, that means that more people will find those positions.
Ease of Use: Embedding a widget is quite easy. If you have a blog, you just create a new box on one of your tool bars, copy and paste the HTML of whatever widget you want to add to your site into that box, and then save your changes. The widget will appear on your toolbar next time you load your site.
Creating your own widget is also easier than it once was, thanks to free online services. The Free Kareem campaign, for example, created a Free Kareem widget of news update on Kareem’s imprisonment using the free application WidgetBox.com.
Tags: Change.org, Egypt, Free Kareem, USA, Widget
Posted in Americas, Mid-East & N. Africa, Tools, Widgets | No Comments »
Why LinkedOut Syrians are LinkedIn again
Written by Mary Joyce on April 21, 2009 – 7:17 pm -
Although professional networking site LinkedIn remains blocked for Sudanese users, Syrian users recently got their access to the site back. Let’s take a look at how that happened.
Background: In early April, Syrian users of LinkedIn found that their accounts had been blocked. Initially, it seems that LinkedIn simply blocked Syrian IP addresses, since Syrian users could still access their accounts through proxy servers like TOR. However, a few days ago LinkedIn (I’m guessing here) figured out that Syrian users (no strangers to Internet censorship) had found a way around their basic block and started shutting down individual accounts. Syrian blogger Anas received the following explanation for this denial of service on April 17th from LinkedIn Customer Service:
Per the terms of our User Agreement, use of LinkedIn services, including our software, is subject to export and re-export control laws and regulations. This includes the Export Administration Regulations maintained by the United States Department of Commerce and sanctions programs maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Under the User Agreement, LinkedIn Users warrant that they are not prohibited from receiving U.S. origin products, including services or software. As such, and as a matter of corporate policy, we do not allow member accounts or access to our site from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.
Apparently, this reference to “sanctions” refers to a 2003 law which limited software exports to the above-mentioned countries. Other online services, like Google, Amazon, and the domain site GoDaddy have totally or partially blocked Syrian access to their services in accordance with this these sanctions. But why did LinkedIn act now, six years after the sanctions were passed?
Activist Response: Not surprisingly, when the blockage first occurred, Syrian bloggers spoke out. However, this did not result in a lift of the block, but in making the blockage more effective by cutting off user accounts. Then, two actions began after this story broke on Global Voice Advocacy on April 18th. First, Jillian York, writer on Global Voices, started a small Twitter meme using the hashtags #boycottlinkedin (22 tweets) and #linkedinfail (3 tweets). This was an attempt to recreate the recent hype of the hashtag #amazonfail (over 1500 tweets), which occurred when gay-themed books were removed from Amazon’s rankings.
Second, Jillian wrote a piece on the blockage in the prominent American political blog Huffington Post and Evgeny Morozov mentioned the case in a piece for Foreign Policy’s Net Effects blog.
LinkedIn’s Response: What’s surprising is that, small as it was, it seems that the Twitter campaign was what finally got a reaction from LinkedIn. According to Jillian:
kluo (Kay Luo), Senior Director of Corporate Communications for LinkedIn (or as she refers to herself, LinkedIn employee #99) contacted me and others on Twitter to find out what was going on. After a few short back-and-forths, she announced that the deletion of Syrian user accounts was in fact an error and would be fixed.
And it was fixed. According to Jillian, LinkedIn is still honoring the sanctions in that they do not allow Syrians to download applications from their site, but they have scaled back their limitations, so Syrians once more have access to their LinkedIn accounts.
Why it Worked: While Jillian credits the cumulative effect of Syiran bloggers + Huffington post + the 2 Twitter hashtags, I think what caused LinkedIn to capitulate so quickly (and so obsequiously) was fear of another #amazonfail fiasco. (Noted one popular blog, “The only thing anyone can agree on was 
Amazon.com PR’s complete mishandling of the situation.”) Though Kay mentioned Jillian’s Huffington Post article in a tweet, it seems that Twitter was where LinkedIn’s attention was, since that’s how Kay contacted Jillian and that’s where she issued her mea culpa (left).
Though I credit LinkedIn with their decision to enforce their sanction obligation with a surgical blade rather than a battle ax, I question their decision not to address this in their response to Jillian. LinkedIn Customer Service gave a very clear reason why Syrian users were blocked (the sanctions), which is quite different from “human error 
bug from a release last month” which Kay provided as an explanation. (Ethan Zuckerman is more sympathetic to LinkedIn’s response to the sanctions.)
Implications: Why am I being critical, since LinkedIn did, in Jillian’s words, “do the right thing”? First off, because they are still blocking users in Sudan and, since the customer service response also mentioned Cuba, Iran, and North Korea, we can assume that they are still blocking users in those countries as well. (Readers, please confirm if you have contacts.)
Unlike blocking Google Gears, blocking a social network is particularly insidious because these platforms are extremely useful organizing tools for activists. And, while DigiActive is the first to admit to the drawbacks of these tools, anyone in the US government interested in supporting open societies should seek to increase access to social networks in repressive countries, not block them with sanctions. President Obama’s recent policy of granting access the of US telecom companies to Cuba makes LinkedIn’s actions towards Syria all the more perplexing.
Another sad lesson from this story is that this Syrian issue really only gained traction when it hit the US/English media. Kay makes specific reference to Jillian’s Huffington Post article, so we can assume that this kind of high-profile attention was one of the warning signs for LinkedIn of this-might-turn-into-#amazonfail. Good news is that, thanks to blogs like Huffington Post and Global Voices Advocacy, which broke the story, raising the profile of a foreign injustice is more accessible than it was in the days when you needed to convince a newspaper reporter with a deadline that your story mattered. These new media outlets, particularly Global Voices, are much more accessible to the world’s activists.
Lessons for Activists: I think this case has 4 lessons for digital activists. Here they are:
- Think like your target: What was LinkedIn’s greatest fear? Another #amazonfail. Jillian’s Twitter campaign was a realization of that fear and LinkedIn reacted quickly.
- Use media your target is using: It’s almost a cliche to say that you need to meet your supporters where they are, but this is also true for your target. Twitter was only an effective means of pressuring LinkedIn because their PR person was keeping a close watch on her Twitter feed. This is actually rather surprising. (Clearly, LinkedIn is quite hip.) A better bet was the article on Huffington Post. If you publish in a place where influential people seek information, chances are your target will see it too.
- Link your campaign to the news cycle: Again, #linkedinfail built off the embarrassment of #amazonfail, which had been leading tech news only a few days before.
- Go to where your target is: Blocked users live in Syria. LinkedIn is an American company. LinkedIn reacted when the news hit in America. This is no coincidence. Get into the media market where your opponent is.
LinkedIn has been very responsive about lifting the account block on Syria and I hope it will lift the blocks on Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and North Korea as well, or at least give an explanation of why it is choosing to lift some bans while leaving others in place.
Image credits: (from top) DigiActive, Jillian York, DigiActive
Tags: cuba, Global Voices, Huffington Post, Iran, LinkedIn, North Korea, sudan, Syria, twitter activism, USA
Posted in Americas, Campaigns, Mid-East & N. Africa, Mobile Phones, Social Networks | No Comments »
What Pew’s 2008 Election Poll Means for Digital Activism
Written by Mary Joyce on April 19, 2009 – 4:48 am -Last week the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan American “fact tank” that studies social trends, released their report on the Internet’s role in the 2008 presidential elections. The results of the poll were not surprising. Political use of the Internet increased from 2004, both in the sense of Web 1.0 information-seeking and Web 2.0 content-generation. The Internet has also moved up in the media rankings; it’s tied with newspapers as a source for political information, though TV still leads.
However, what I am most interested in is the implications of these trends for digital activism. Does online political activity during the election reveal any trends in the likelihood of Americans to use the Internet in organizing for social or political change? While information about the proliferation of online communities and an increase in “participation” (as opposed passive information-seeking) made me optimistic, the poll did not seek to ascertain the effect of online activity on offline outcomes or to differentiate between participative activities I would consider activism (creating strategic communities of interest and organizing actions) from more passive participation, like joining an email list.
This is not to say that there wasn’t plently of cause for pessimism as well. The increase in partisanship online became the Associated Press’ headline for their story on the poll. People who engage with politics online are more likely than they were in 2004 to visit sites that share their point of view. This seems to vindicate Nicholas Negroponte’s theory of the Daily Me and Cass Sunstein’s theory of echo chambers, both of which imply that current online political behaviors are detrimental to democracy because they feed narrow-mindedness and create fragmentation. (This is the cyber-skeptic side of the Internet-and-democracy debate, the optimistic side being represented by Yochai Benkler and his theory of the networked public sphere, among others.)
The participative Internet is good for pluralism, but pluralism is a double-edged sword. While the Pew report does give support to a theory of echo-chambers, it also clarifies that there are many echo chambers, not just the left and right poles made famous by the map (left) of the US political blogosphere presented in the 2005 by researchers Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance.
The Pew poll notes that those who are “most information hungry” (let’s call them political junkies) “are delving more deeply into the ‘long tail‘ of online political content, where they frequently seek out information that carries a distinct partisan slant….” So the politically engaged Internet user of today is likely to find a community of like-minded people who share her views. This could be positive if these online communities give their members the power to lobby decision-makers on the issues that matter to them. It could be negative if these more fragmented communities merely replicate the polarized online world of Sunstein and Negroponte: pro-life vs. pro-choice, gay marriage supporters vs. NOM.
I tend to believe in the positive interpretation of online pluralism: more communities of interest means more sources of collective power and more influence from ordinary citizens. Part of the reason I believe this is that there was so much online participation this cycle (see graph below).
Although Obama supporters were more politically engaged than McCain supporters, probably due to the Obama campaign’s more robust new media operation (full disclosure – I was an OFA new media employee), both sets of supporters were “participating” actively online. I use the word “participating” in quotes, because the Pew poll makes no distinction between “engaging politically in an online social network,” which implied, at least for the Obama campaign, the ability to form groups, plan events, and exercise significant agency, from “signing up for email news alerts,” which in this context means being the recipient of a broadcasted signal.
Another reason it’s difficult to get at the implications for digital activism, as I stated earlier, is because the poll does not seek to ascertain the effect of online participation or its connection to offline events. Were people who participated online more likely to vote, canvass, or convince a friend to take political action? We don’t know. I hope the next Pew election poll in 2012 recognizes that the most salient forms of online political participation have effects offline, and that in order to gauge the effects of online action, we need to look for the effects of that action in the real world.
image sources: Adamic and Glance via www.futureofthebook.org; the Pew Internet and American Life Project
Tags: elections, Pew, poll, research, USA
Posted in Americas, Theory | 1 Comment »
Campaign: Sinclair Broadcasting Boycott of 2004
Written by DigiActive Team on March 12, 2009 – 4:09 am -NOTE: This post is an excerpt from The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. It is rather unusual for DigiActive to reproduce an extended excerpt from another source. (The sub-headings and links have been added, but the text is unedited.) The reason is because 1) the author permits reproduction of the online version of the book under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license and 2) this case study is so well written, we really could not improve on it. We encourage you to read and annotate this spectacular book at http://yupnet.org/benkler/ and buy a copy through Yale University Press or Amazon.
Figure 7.1: Sinclair Stock, October 8-November 5, 2004
Description: Sinclair, which owns major television stations in a number of what were considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 election— including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa—informed its staff and stations that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its sixty-two stations to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news program, a week and a half before the elections. 2 The documentary was reported to be a strident attack on Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War service. One reporter in Sinclair’s Washington bureau, who objected to the program and described it as “blatant political propaganda,” was promptly fired. 3 The fact that Sinclair owns stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, that it used its ownership to preempt local broadcast schedules, and that it fired a reporter who objected to its decision, make this a classic “Berlusconi effect” story, coupled with a poster-child case against media concentration and the ownership of more than a small number of outlets by any single owner. The story of Sinclair’s plans broke on Saturday, October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, “official” responses were beginning to emerge in the Democratic Party. The Kerry campaign raised questions about whether the program violated election laws as an undeclared “in-kind” contribution to the Bush campaign. By Tuesday, October 12, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while seventeen Democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or intervened throughout the episode.
Digital Tools: cross-referencing blogs (in particular talkingpointsmemo.com, MyDD.com, dailyKos.com), web sites (stopsinclair.org, BoycottSBG.com)
How These Tools Were Used: Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number of political blogs—Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo.com, Chris Bower on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted in the dailyKos and MyDD. A “boycottSinclair” site was set up by one individual, and was pointed to by these blogs.
Tags: elections, Sinclair, USA, Yochai Benkler
Posted in Americas, Blogs, Campaigns | No Comments »
Digitally Active Org: The U.S. Campaign for Burma
Written by Audubon on December 12, 2008 – 3:43 am -
Web site: www.uscampaignforburma.org
What is it?: The U.S. Campaign for Burma (USCB) is “a U.S.-based membership organization dedicated to empowering grassroots activists around the world to bring about an end to the military dictatorship in Burma through public education, leadership development initiatives, conferences, and advocacy campaigns at local, national and international levels.” With a small staff and smaller budget, USCB has grown its membership from a few hundred people to over 60,000 in the past three years. New media outreach was a key component in this growth, used to organize activists and raise awareness about the cause of Burma.
Tools: instant messaging, e-newsletters, blog, digital video, online social networks (Facebook, Myspace, Change.org, etc.), Ustream live video conferences, teleconferences, listservs, user-created media (photos, videos, t-shirt designs).
USCB has managed to dramatically increase their outreach by combining online with offline organizing. A coordinated YouTube campaign to launch 30 produced videos in 30 days helped increase exposure to the general public, since the spots starred Hollywood celebrities. But public reaction to the spots was mixed. Also, traditional media played a role in the successes and challenges of USCB’s outreach: with Burma often in the news this year (monks’ protest, Cyclone Nargis), more people became aware of the cause and eager to connect with USCB, but media of these events also somewhat overshadowed the organizational work of USCB. The full slideshow goes into more detail, with quotes from people at USCB.
Tags: burma, USA
Posted in Americas, Asia, Orgs & People | No Comments »
Event: DigiActive’s 1st meet-up – Boston
Written by DigiActive Team on November 29, 2008 – 6:53 pm -
What? DigiActive’s first meet-up
When? Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Where? Diesel Café (click for map) in Boston, USA
Why? meet DigiActive team members Mary (Co-Founder), Patrick (Director of Applied Research), and Kate (Correspondent) to talk about digital activism over a warm cappuccino.
How? If you’d like to come, please sign up on the event’s Facebook page.
Tags: Boston, meet-up, USA
Posted in DigiActive News, Events | No Comments »
Campaign: Mommy Bloggers Halt Motrin Ad
Written by Mary Joyce on November 20, 2008 – 3:59 pm -
Description: When Motrin, an American company that sells pain medication, released a web ad (above) implying that moms who wear their infants in a sling or snuggly were making a fashion statement, moms got mad. Using a variety of online tools, tech-savvy moms protested the ad and called for Motrin to remove it from their site.
Digital Activism Tools: blogs, Youtube (to spread the offensive ad and post commentary), Twitter (a dedicated channel and lots of discussion)
How These Tools Are Being Used: Blogger Amy Gates of Crunchy Domestic Goddess was the first to post about the offensive nature of the Motrin ad on the night of Saturday the 15th. On Sunday afternoon, a dedicated Twitter feed, http://twitter.com/motrinmoms, was created specifically to spread information (and outrage) about the ad.
Youtube also played a role. Different users uploaded recordings of the offensive ad to make sure it was seen and at least one Mom uploaded a video commentary, calling on Motrin to stop their ad campaign. “My headaches have nothing to do with wearing my baby,” says the vlogger. “That, in fact, actually makes me feel better. My headache, right now, was caused by you.” In addition, one interesting mash-up video, created by One True Media, is composed of tweets from the Twitterfeed and photos of moms wearing their babies.
Outcome: Motrin pulled down the ad on Sunday night (day after the protest began) and issued a blanket apology on their web site (screen shot after the jump).
Tags: mommy bloggers, motrin, USA
Posted in Americas, Blogs, Campaigns, Microblogging | 2 Comments »