Tocqueville in Cyberspace: Using the Internet for Citizen Associations

Klein, Hans

doi:10.1080/019722499128376

Cited by 117 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Although one informant self-described his role as being an 'armchair activist' (Greg, personal communication), the informants tried to find time to participate in the activities suited to their interests, confirming the Internet's tendency to reduce the burden of participation in political activities, as mentioned in the literature (e.g., Bennett, 2003;Klein, 1999).…”

Section: Participationmentioning

confidence: 91%

Internet use for political mobilization: Voices of participants

Hara

2008

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The Internet has been used extensively for U.S. presidential election campaigns since the year 2000. In 2004, Internet campaigning grew to be more interactive than in previous years. The question of whether or not the Internet is making a difference in political outcomes has become noteworthy, and research efforts have examined political campaigns via websites, characteristics of the politically active population, and roles of the media. Among various campaign forces, activities organized by the online grassroots activist group MoveOn.org have become prominent. This article reports the voices of people who participated in political activities coordinated by MoveOn during the 2004 presidential election campaigns. The data were collected primarily through interviews. The findings contrast similarities and differences between participants in different levels of participation. Whereas most past studies focused on the macro level, this study is focused on the micro level. The article calls for further development of a theoretical framework for collective action facilitated via online and taking place offline.

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Section: Participationmentioning

confidence: 91%

Internet use for political mobilization: Voices of participants

Hara

2008

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“…Internet-assisted activism, its labors, and their socio-technical underpinnings and solutions seem likely to stay on the agenda, because Internet elements are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and integral to much social action, and because their affordances are by no means clear. In both politics (Bimber & David, 2003, p. 166;Foot & Schneider 2006, p. 155) and civic life more widely (Klein, 1999;Shah et al, 2001), analysts seem to agree that the Internet may be highly effective in facilitating activism. And, as noted above, the political professionals who help define campaign assemblages and their openness to activist participation seem much more open to the idea of citizen involvement today than they did as recently as the 1990s (see Weir & Ganz, 1997 on the organizational side of this skepticism, and Stromer-Galley, 2000 on the sociotechnical side).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As has been argued elsewhere, the extent to which most of what we observe today represents a distinct kind of 'Internet', 'cyber', or 'Web' activism is debatable (Tilly, 2004 Foot & Schneider, 2006;Garrett, 2006;Klein 1999;Tilly, 2004). This argument is at the heart of more popular celebrations of Internet-assisted peoplepowered politics too (Rheingold, 2002;Trippi, 2004 Internet and that this may inhibit collective action by increasing transaction costs (Eppler & Mengis, 2004;Edmunds & Morris, 2000).…”

Section: Theorizing Internet-assisted Activismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Nielsen

2009

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

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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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“…In general, the third wave of social movements taking shape today is marked by an emphasis on the interaction between the individual and technology. This is obvious in theonlinepiracymovementaswellasintheOpenSource movement, and in the new wave of citizen journalism (Gillmor, 2006;Klein, 1999) or the participatory cultures describedbythelikesofJenkins(2006a;2006b).Thevery use of contemporary technologies can in these cases contribute to feelings of freedom, autonomy and participation.…”

Section: Changesinpoliticalactivism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The subpolitics of online piracy: A Swedish case study

Lindgren

Linde

2012

Convergence

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'Pirates'and'anti-pirates'havebecomecommonconcepts in the cultural political debate, as the file sharing phenomenon is a delicate and disputed subject. The fact that people organize in networks to share data with each other has led film and music companies from all over the world to initiate a number of anti-piracy organizations, assigned to protect the property rights to culture and information. In Sweden, the industrial organization The Swedish Bureau of Antipiracy on the one side, and the network The Bureau of Piracy together with The Pirate Party,ontheother,playimportantpartsintheprevailing conflict.Thepurposeofthispaperistoapplyasociological perspectiveonthecollectiveactoffilesharing.Byfocusing onthedistinctlyorganizedpartoffilesharingactivitiesas well as on the everyday practices of users, the goal is to describe how the collective action and the production of knowledge,takingplaceinrelationtoonlinepiracy,canbe understood.

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Tocqueville in Cyberspace: Using the Internet for Citizen Associations

Cited by 117 publications

References 10 publications

Internet use for political mobilization: Voices of participants

Internet use for political mobilization: Voices of participants

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

The subpolitics of online piracy: A Swedish case study

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