Research Catalog

Title

Digitally enabled social change : activism in the Internet age / Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport.

Author

Earl, Jennifer, 1974-

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2011.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Kimport, Katrina, 1978-

Description

viii, 258 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the emergence of "Internet activism," but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? In this book the authors examine key characteristics of Web activism and investigate their impacts on organizing and participation. They argue that the Web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together. A rally can be organized and demonstrators recruited entirely online, without the cost of printing and mailing; an activist can create an online petition in minutes and gather e-signatures from coast to coast using only her laptop. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, they show that the more these affordances are leveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest; the less these affordances are leveraged, the more superficial the changes. The rally organizers, for example, can save money on communication and coordination, but the project of staging the rally remains essentially the same. Tools that allow a single activist to create and circulate a petition entirely online, however, enable more radical changes in the process. The transformative nature of these changes, they suggest, demonstrate the need to revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions about social movements.

Series Statement

Acting with technology

Uniform Title

Acting with technology.

Subjects

• Internet and activism
• Social change
• Social movements
• Social action
• Online social networks > Political aspects
• Internet > Political aspects

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Where we have been and where we are headed -- The look and feel of e-tactics and their Web sites -- Tacking action on the cheap: costs and participation -- Making action on the cheap: costs and organizing -- Being together versus working together : copresence in participation -- From power in numbers to power laws: copresence in organizing -- A new digital repertoire of contention?

ISBN

• 9780262015103 (hbk. : alk. paper)
• 0262015102 (hbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2010021113

OCLC

• 639573767
• SCSB-12473603

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library