I was quoted in an article in today’s Washington Post on Facebook activism. The article, entitled “Facebook’s Easy Virtue: Click-Through Activism Broad but Fleeting”, challenges the significance of Facebook activism and the value of its offline effects since most members of activist groups on Facebook do not take action beyond the first click. Here is [...] [...more]
I was quoted in an article in today’s Washington Post on Facebook activism. The article, entitled “Facebook’s Easy Virtue: Click-Through Activism Broad but Fleeting”, challenges the significance of Facebook activism and the value of its offline effects since most members of activist groups on Facebook do not take action beyond the first click. Here is my quote:
Hilton illustrates what Mary Joyce calls “the pluses and minuses for the low bar of entry” of Facebook groups. Joyce is the co-founder of DigiActive.org, an organization that helps grass-roots activists figure out how to use digital technology to boost their impact.
The low bar of entry means that joining — or starting — a cause is easy, and that causes can reach and educate a wide range of people. That’s the plus. But that ease also means that well-intentioned groups could balloon to thousands of members, most of whom lack activism experience.”Commitment levels are opaque,” says Joyce, who last year took a leave from DigiActive to work as new-media operations manager for Barack Obama’s campaign. “Maybe a maximum of 5 percent are going to take action, and maybe it’s closer to 1 percent. . . . In most cases of Facebook groups, members do nothing. I haven’t yet seen a case where the Facebook group has led to a sustained movement.”
There have, of course, been big examples of single-event success: The Internet-based organization Burma Global Action Network began as one American’s Facebook group, formed to support monks’ protest. The group coordinated a global “day of action” in 2007 that drew protesters around the world. More measurably, the release of Fouad Mourtada, imprisoned for impersonating a member of Moroccan royalty online, was attributed in part to protests that began on Facebook and Flickr and spread offline. And politically, Obama’s campaign was famously driven by social networking participation.
But more often the stories of Facebook activism look like Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement earlier this year, in which a Facebook group calling for a national strike in support of laborers gained a much-publicized 75,000 Facebook members . . . and then fizzled out in real life.
In some ways, it’s harder to cite the failures than the successes, because there are simply so many of them, disintegrating before they reach the public’s eye. Even some of the success stories are qualified: Participation in the Burma network decreased as coverage of it fell out of the news, Joyce says.
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UPDATE: This presentation is now being featured on http://www.slideshare.net/category/news-politics
Here’s a presentation I made today at Participation Camp in New York on forms of citizen participation and the technology environments that surround them. I start with institutional governmental participation and its current technological form, gov 2.0. Next I discuss extra-institutional [...] [...more]
Here’s a presentation I made today at Participation Camp in New York on forms of citizen participation and the technology environments that surround them. I start with institutional governmental participation and its current technological form, gov 2.0. Next I discuss extra-institutional (and legal) participation in the form of advocacy and NGO technology culture. Finally I present extra-institutional (and illegal) participation in the form of civil disobedience and digital activism for protest.
NOTE: cross-posted from DigiActive.org
One the big stories with regard to digital activism in Iran has been the use of citizen media to disseminate information about the protests (see references here, here, and here). The picture above, from the front page of today’s New York Times is putatively an image of the daughter of reformist [...] [...more]
One the big stories with regard to digital activism in Iran has been the use of citizen media to disseminate information about the protests (see references here, here, and here). The picture above, from the front page of today’s New York Times is putatively an image of the daughter of reformist cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but could just as easily be an illustration of the new media environment: no less than eight cell phones and digital cameras (red circles) are recording the event the New York Times reporter was photographing. (For a large version of the photo, click here.) It’s old print media and new digital citizen media juxtaposed in a single image.
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NOTE: cross-posted from DigiActive
Background: On June 14th , Iranian expatriates and supporters in cities across the world protested the results of the June 12th election in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad claimed a statistically unlikely landslide victory over challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The new slogan around the world became “where is my vote?” as [...] [...more]
Background: On June 14th , Iranian expatriates and supporters in cities across the world protested the results of the June 12th election in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad claimed a statistically unlikely landslide victory over challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The new slogan around the world became “where is my vote?” as protesters asked why the votes of Mousavi supporters had not been counted. The campaign, which I will describe below, has both centralized and decentralized elements and has succeeded so far in organizing worldwide protest.
The question is, will this structure allow for the sustained campaigning necessary to overturn the vote? In the language of Gaurav Mishra’s 4 C’s of Social Media, this campaign has achieved Content creation and Collaboration on collective action, but will it be able to create a Community which will sustain longterm action once the Iranian election is gone from the headlines?
Tools: Facebook, Twitter, stand-alone web sites, citizen media sites
How these tools are being used: This campaign began before Election Day. Setade Ma (meaning “our campaign”), a site launched at the end of May, encouraged voting in the upcoming election. The central action associated with this campaign was worldwide simultaneous demonstrations on May 31st (similar to those that occurred on the 14th). At the May 31st demonstrations, participants around the world were asked to hold banners saying “we vote” and then to submit those photos to the central site, similar to the geographically-dispersed take-a-photo tactic used in the US for the Step it Up campaign against global warning and in Morocco for the Help Erraji campaign. (It is not clear how people outside Iran were actually going to vote in the election, unless Iran has an effective system of absentee ballots, but the goal seemed to be to create a mass movement in favor of voting.) Showing awareness of the ability of social media to spread a campaign, the site also linked to its own Facebook group, Twitter stream, and a page on Balitarin, a community website that helps its users find links of interest on the Iranian Internet.
This previous organizing proved crucial in helping activists to organize worldwide protests only two days after the election on June 14th. The Setade Ma Twitter stream did not end up being particularly useful, amassing only 125 followers (and excellent graphic design). However, the Setade Ma Facebook group proved key. After the election it was transformed into the largest “where is my vote?” Facebook group and was used to organize the London, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington DC protest on June 14th.
The Facebook group organized by the Sedate Ma activists ended up being only one of the many Facebook groups (see right) created using the “where is my vote” (WiMV) meme and logo. There are dynamics of both centralization and decentralization at work here. There are 24 WiMV groups on Facebook and the Sedate Ma group is by far the largest with 3,000 members at this time. The other groups are smaller, with a few hundred to less than 10 members. This is not necessarily a weakness. Facebook allows groups to only message 5,000 members at a time, so Facebook groups can only be used for effective communication at low volume.
Some organizers, who may or may not be associated with Setade Ma, created a stand-alone web site, whereismyvote.org, to direct potential supporters to Facebook groups organizing protests in Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, Boston, and Winnipeg. It is generally a good idea to create a stand-along site to mirror and centralize information on the frustratingly decentralized Facebook (as recommended in DigiActive’s Facebook Guide). However, only three of the five links point to the pages indicated. In the flurry of event creation, centralized control seemed to have been difficult.
Another interesting Facebook action was the campaign to change your profile picture to the green WiMV icon (also at right). This meme appears to have been started by a smaller WiMV Facebook group and the profile action seems to have been that group’s main purpose. The only information in the description section of the group is “If you voted for Mousavi change your profile picture to / WHERE IS MY VOTE? image / Join this group and invite your friends to do the same. lets make facebook green”. (Green is the symbolic color of Islam and Iran.) Changing profile pictures really leverages the network effects of Facebook. When one person changes their profile image that change is pushed out to all that person’s friends via the friend feed. Ideally, the following exchanges occur:
Finally, the organizers attempted to promote their events through citizen media sites, which have a wider audience than a Facebook group but are more accessible to activists than the mainstream media. For example, A supporter posted a photo and links about the San Francisco protest on the site Now Public, which collects and distributes news from unconventional sources by letting citizen journalists upload their own stories.
Outcome: Based on the photos and video uploaded by WiMV supporters, it appears that international protests on June 14th occurred in San Francisco (USA), London (UK) , Dallas (USA), Paris (France), Dubai (UAE), Melbourne (Australia), Köln (Germany), Atlanta (USA), Washington DC (USA), Los Angeles (USA), Winnipeg (Canada), Boston (USA), and Toronto (Canada). At somes protests dozens were present, at others over 100. (You can see a selection of images from the protests after the jump.)
It was certainly a successful example of fast, free, international collective action. The question is, where will the movement go r from here and will it be able to transform current enthusiasm and ad hoc organizing into an organizational structure with the stamina to continue a longer campaign?
Analysis: The WiMV campaign followed a decentralized structure that is common to digital activism campaigns built around high-profile issues. However, was this decentralization a good thing for the cause? On the positive side, it is likely that more events were organized because people who became aware of the WiMV/June 14th meme could create their own Facebook page to organize an event in their area and invite their friends and contacts. This seems to be the case with the WiMV Melbourne, Dubai, and Atlanta groups. (Other local pages were created but they did not seems to organize protests.) In another benefit of localization, the very active Paris group created their own profile icon in French: “ou est leur vote?” (where is their vote?) and their own Blogspot blog, which acted as a stand-alone site to centralize information about their protest.
Unfortunately, the negatives of decentralization seem to be more substantial than the positives. The first reason is misinformation. While the “official” DC protest was meant to take place at the Iranian Interests Section, someone posted on the wall of another group that the DC protest should be on the lawn of the White House. Second, many of the groups were “identity” groups rather than “action” groups. People joined them to identify with the cause of free and fair elections in Iran, but no protests were organized within those groups. People who potentially could have been recruited to attend a protest fell into the “dead zone” of inactive group.
The most serious concern with regard to decentralization is its implications for sustainability. Supporters are spread across a miriad number of event groups on Facebook, which was effective enough for this first action, but how will these supporters be contacted for future actions that are not organized at the local level? (Also, what about people who attended the protests but are not members of the Facebook group? Was their contact info collected?)
For true coordination beyond a high-attention meme, centralization is necessay and WiMV’s current structure on Facebook does not lend itself the the sustainable community which is most likely to lead to future collaboration and action. After the the explosion of activity for June 14th, people interested in continued action will need to come together into a single leadership team and then start reaching out to the group founders in an effort to get everyone on the same listserv and in the same group. It will not be a fun or easy process but it will be necessary to create a sustainabile community for this issue.
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I gave this presentation yesterday at DigiActive’s meet-up in Washington DC. It is a basic introduction to the field of digital activism, including case studies from Colombia, Pakistan, and China, qualities of good digital activism, challenges to the field, and DigiActive’s activities in the space.
[...more]
I gave this presentation yesterday at DigiActive’s meet-up in Washington DC. It is a basic introduction to the field of digital activism, including case studies from Colombia, Pakistan, and China, qualities of good digital activism, challenges to the field, and DigiActive’s activities in the space.
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Today at the NetSquared conference I had the pleasure of representing DigiActive at a session on mobile advocacy with tech activist Nathan Freitas, Mark Belinsky of Digital Democracy, and Paul Lamb of Man on a Mission. My presentation (slides below) focused on mobile organizing strategies, particularly the strengths and weaknesses of centralized, decentralized, and hybrid [...] [...more]
Today at the NetSquared conference I had the pleasure of representing DigiActive at a session on mobile advocacy with tech activist Nathan Freitas, Mark Belinsky of Digital Democracy, and Paul Lamb of Man on a Mission. My presentation (slides below) focused on mobile organizing strategies, particularly the strengths and weaknesses of centralized, decentralized, and hybrid options. Thanks for participants to participants Marsha Lanier and Matthew Fitzgerald for their great comments.
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Last week I gave a presentation on Design and Advocacy for the Health Media Initiative at the Open Society Institute. The meeting was for an HMI fellows program which allows Parsons‘ design students to travel to OSI public health grantee organizations and assist them in creating outreach and advocacy materials.
The goal [...] [...more]
Last week I gave a presentation on Design and Advocacy for the Health Media Initiative at the Open Society Institute. The meeting was for an HMI fellows program which allows Parsons‘ design students to travel to OSI public health grantee organizations and assist them in creating outreach and advocacy materials.
The goal of my presentation was to introduce the students to advocacy strategy and give some examples of advocacy design. I chose some international examples featured on DigiActive and some from the Obama campaign. I had great fun giving the presentation (above) and meeting the fellows. I wish them lots of luck as they head out into the field this summer.
UPDATE: Just got an e-mail from the folks at SlideShare saying they’d featured this presentation on their homepage
This is a great talk by Open Society Institute fellow Zack Exley on innovations in organizing in the Obama campaign. Zack is a founder of the New Organizing Institute and worked with the Obama campaign as a consultant and researcher. He was online director for the British Labor Party’s 2005 campaign, director of online organizing [...] [...more]
This is a great talk by Open Society Institute fellow Zack Exley on innovations in organizing in the Obama campaign. Zack is a founder of the New Organizing Institute and worked with the Obama campaign as a consultant and researcher. He was online director for the British Labor Party’s 2005 campaign, director of online organizing for Kerry-Edwards 2004, and organizing director at MoveOn.org. He also served as an adviser to the Dean campaign and spent much of the 1990s working as a union organizer.
Note: cross-posted from DigiActive
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 [...] [...more]
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
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Because I would like all people to be able to take political action through the internet, the question of increasing access is interesting to me. I was intrigued when my friend Patrick Meier sent me a link to Question Box. The Question Box is a telephone intercom which allows people to connect to the internet [...] [...more]
. Because I would like all people to be able to take political action through the internet, the question of increasing access is interesting to me. I was intrigued when my friend Patrick Meier sent me a link to Question Box. The Question Box is a telephone intercom which allows people to connect to the internet without literacy or computer skills. Users place a free call by pushing the green button on the box, which connects them to an operator sitting in front of an Internet-enabled computer. The operator can search for information or send email on behalf of the caller, translating information into the local language when necessary.
There are things I like about this project and things I don’t. First, on the positive side, creating a system which gives internet access to the illiterate rural poor is a bold move. If this is not the most difficult demographic to get online, then it is certainly one of the most difficult and I applaud not only their courage in seeking to connect this group, but their success in doing so.
I also like the simplicity of the solution. In seeking to bring internet access to the illiterate, it would have been tempting to create a high-tech solution involving interactive voice response (IVR) or natural language processing software. Question Box uses a telephone intercom and a human being in front of a computer. It’s simple and it works.
My criticism has to do with Question Box’s business plan, or lack there-of. My concern with their financial sustainability is in some part affected by the recent post on Project Diaspora about the unsustainability of sending free insecticide-treated bed nets to Africa. The argument is that by producing these nets abroad and distributing them for free, the local African manufacturers are forced out of business because they cannot compete with a free product, leaving no local source of bed nets if the non-profit organizations decide to stop providing them.
The case with Question Box is a little different. There is no local voice-to-internet sector which is being put out of business by Question Box. However, the boxes are currently being operated at no cost to the user by a partnership of two NGOs, The NIIT Institute in India and Open Mind in the US, the latter of which is supported by friends, family, anonymous individuals, and the Grameen Foundation. What happens if a major donor (or one of the non-profits) loses interest? It will mean no more internet for the people of Ethida and Poolpur, the two villages which currently have boxes.
Another reason why the donor-driven model bothers me is that this is the perfect project for a micro-entrepreneur model. Here I am thinking of Click Diagnostics, founded by my friend Mridul Chowdhury. Click provides basic medical diagnosis to people in rural areas through local micro-entrepreneurs who take high-resolution photographs of an infection and then send the photo to an urban doctor for diagnosis. The program is sustainable because the micro-entrepreneur earns a small fee for providing the diagnostic service to the patient.
The same model could work for Question Box. Instead of making the call over the Question Box free, a small fee could be paid, which would be a source of income for the operator. These fees need not cover the cost of the box, since eventually users will be able to call the internet operator directly from their cell phone. The fee could be paid using pre-paid phone cards, which are widely available in India, and since Question Box funder Grameen Foundation is also affiliated with a phone company, creating such a partnership is not far-fetched.
Bringing more people online may not increase digital activism by the poor, but it certainly increases the possibilities. For this reason, I’d like to see more financially sustainable solutions for increasing the wired population.
Background: On June 14th , Iranian expatriates and supporters in cities across the world protested the results of the June 12th election in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad claimed a statistically unlikely landslide victory over challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The new slogan around the world became “where is my vote?” as protesters asked why the votes of Mousavi supporters had not been counted. The campaign, which I will describe below, has both centralized and decentralized elements and has succeeded so far in organizing worldwide protest.
Today at the NetSquared conference I had the pleasure of representing 
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 
