Guardians of the Internet: Building and Sustaining the Anonymous Online Community

Abstract

Online communities have displaced or become complements to organizations such as churches, labor unions and political groups which have traditionally been at the center of collective action. Yet, despite their growing influence and support of faster, cheaper and more flexible organizing, few empirical studies address how online communities are built and become enduring agents of social change. Using Internet-based ethnographic methods, this inductive field study examines how an online community called Anonymous transitioned from being a small gathering of contributors focused on recreation to becoming a community of trolls, activists and hackers incubating myriad projects. Findings reveal that the interplay of digital technology and a culture of transgression supported experimentation that culminated with the adoption of a resilient organizing platform that enabled several community factions to coexist in continuous engagement. This paper infuses community building research with an important emphasis on the role of the techno-cultural, highlighting how online formation and maintenance processes are shaped and shape mutually contingent technologies and cultures.

The Art of the Pivot: How New Ventures Manage Identification Relationships with Stakeholders as They Change Direction

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Exploring the dark and unexpected sides of digitalization: Toward a critical agenda

“…Beyond the business context, the ubiquity and simultaneity of digital technologies allow individuals to connect across time and space, increasing the potentiality of digitalization to constitute new forms of the social, which are alternative to existing (capitalist) institutions, including hacker (e.g., Massa, 2016) or bike commuting collectives (Wilhoit and Kisselburgh, 2015). A range of studies have investigated how digital technologies can contribute to the furthering of liberal and democratic ideals: e.g., accountability, equality, freedom (e.g., Etter et al, 2019: 936; Whelan et al, 2013: 778–779).…”

Activists as Moral Entrepreneurs: How Shareholder Activists Brought Active Ownership To Switzerland

“…This process model being inspired by a single (and successful) case of how the economy has become moralized, there are naturally some specificities related to our context that may not universally apply. For instance, while the importance of free spaces for mobilizing challengers is a cornerstone of social movement research (Rao & Dutta, 2012), whether such free spaces are -as in our case -actively created and thus part of the mobilization process (Massa, 2017) or whether their existence predates mobilization (Heinze & Weber, 2016;Kellogg, 2009; likely varies across settings. In general terms, while the process model points to an interdependence of multiple factors, there is likely variance regarding the importance of any individual factor across settings and some factors may be altogether unnecessary for change to happen under certain circumstances.…”

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