The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication, and Communicative Overload

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of Internet elements in political activism through a close ethnographic case study of a volunteer group involved in the 2008 U.S. presidential primary.Whereas the literature on political activism has generally argued that the Internet provides lowcost communication that facilitates collective action, this case highlights the labors that accompany Internet-assisted activism. The analysis, based upon participant-observation, identifies related problems of overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload with which the activists struggled. Drawing on concepts taken from science and technology studies, the article argues that these problems have socio-technical roots and arise from the specific affordances of an increasing number of Internet elements. Even as such elements reduced the up-front costs associated with communication for the sender, they help generate new transaction costs when they are integrated into heterogeneous assemblages with no shared communication protocol, single infrastructure or clear exostructure, or any other means of tempering the tendency for participating Internet-assisted activists and groups to always communicate more. 3In the aftermath of the February 5 round of the 2008 U.S. presidential primary, I was left with one immediate puzzle: why did the activists that I had followed for a year go more or less off-line in the final days of the campaign? In the run-up to the election, at the very point where I had assumed that the supposed strengths of the Internet-fast, easy, low-cost communication-would be most helpful, the activists threw up their hands in frustration and turned to other tools. They stopped updating their websites, let the social networking tools rest, scaled back on the emailing, and started to coordinate mainly by phone and face-to-face meetings. Various Internet elements, from email and static webpages to cutting-edge social software tools, had been integral to their mobilization, and were often praised. But now, when the group had to perform, Internet-assisted activism turned out to be more laborious than anyone had expected.Based on a participant-observation study of a single campaign, this paper addresses the question of how Internet elements are integrated into political activism. I analyze the labors that now accompany Internet-assisted activism in the form of overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload. As I will show below, neither of the two dominant views of the Internet and collective action capture the concrete problems faced by the activists that I studied. One view has it that low-cost communications facilitate collective action.My case highlights the problems it creates. Another view warns of potentially paralyzing information overload. But the activists were not paralyzed, and their problems arose not from information in general, but from Internet-assisted communication in particular.

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Untitled

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