Max Forte's List: Cyber-Activism

• Evgeny Morozov 

     5th January 2010  —  Issue 166
• Clay Shirky is wrong to be upbeat about how technology is boosting Iran's democracy movement. If anything, it's helping the regime crack down
• Read Clay Shirky’s response to this exchange here
• I am glad that Clay Shirky has offered such a balanced and much-needed rejoinder to the initial optimism that he espoused in his widely-publicised book of 2008, Here Comes Everybody. As I wrote in Prospect’s December cover story, “How Dictators Watch Us On the Web,” I, like Shirky, also view the ongoing events in Iran as a key test for social media’s growing prominence in the politics of authoritarian societies.
• Where I strongly disagree with Shirky, however, is in his upbeat interpretation of the current political developments in Iran.
• I am much less impressed by the role that the social media has played there. The palpable digital enthusiasm surrounding the situation in Iran appears very similar to what we observed in the autumn of 2007, as the “Saffron Revolution” was getting underway in Burma.
• Similarly, that revolution was abetted by mobile phones and text messaging and was widely expected to loosen the junta’s tight grip on power. Today, however, one would need a powerful magnifying glass to notice any major democratic changes in that country.
• the Iranian government has not only survived, but has, in fact, become even more authoritarian
• the last six months could be taken to reveal the impotence of decentralised movements in the face of a ruthless authoritarian state—even when those movements are armed with modern protest tools
• Protests in the streets of Tehran may not have been triggered by those using social media. Shirky himself acknowledges that the protests which took place in Iran on 4th November 2009—traditionally a day of anti-American protest in Iran—have happened in the past too, with or without social media. The only difference this time around is they had a different slogan: “Death to America” was replaced by opposition protesters with “Death to the Dictator.” But was it really the power of Twitter and Facebook that made Iranians stop hating America? Or was it the change of president in the White House?
• Shirky’s other claim—that growing internet censorship in Iran signifies that the government is losing control—fails to persuade me as well. I see it as a logical reaction from a “rational-thinking” government concerned with a possible revolution. The regime may have tried to censor and slow down the internet simply because these are cheap and easily available options
• And while it is certainly true that “a modern economy simply cannot function if people can’t use their phones,” we have seen that authoritarian governments—those in Belarus, China and Moldova are good examples—are increasingly relying on what is known as “event-based internet filtering,” whereby they turn off mobile coverage in those public places where rallies are being organised.
• the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has recently bought a 50 per cent stake in Iran’s newly privatised telecommunications company (costing $7.8 bn), profit considerations may not figure high on their list of concerns
• I simply do not see the “technological auto-immune disease” that Shirky alludes to.
• One unfortunate consequence of limiting our analysis of internet control to censorship only is that it presents all authoritarian governments as technophobic and unable to capitalise on new technologies.
• According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, even Iranians abroad found themselves vulnerable to “social media” harassment by the overzealous Iranian police: any traces of online support that they expressed to the anti-Ahmadinejad protesters were carefully compiled by supporters of the regime and then used against them when they tried to enter the country.
• Those protesting in the streets found their photos posted to a series of pro-government Iranian websites, so that the “community” could help in identifying their names and abetting the authorities.
• We are also beginning to see a spike in fake videos—one, for example, showing protesters burning the portrait of Ali Khamenei—popping up on online, with the obvious goal of creating some internal confusion in the opposition.

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• Evgeny Morozov 

     18th November 2009  —  Issue 165
• The internet is meant to help activists, enable democratic protest and weaken the grip of authoritarian regimes. But it doesn’t—in fact, the web is a boon for bullies
• My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as “the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.
• Its last presidential election in March 2006 was followed by a short-lived and unsuccessful revolution.
• The initial protests were brutally suppressed.
• But where public rallies couldn’t succeed, protesters turned to more creative forms of insurgency: flash mobs. In a flash mob, social media or email is used to assemble a group of people in a public place, who then perform together a brief, often surreal action.
• Some young Belarusians used the blogging service LiveJournal to organise a series of events in Minsk with subtle anti-government messages.
• In a typical flash mob, the youngsters smiled, read newspapers or ate ice-cream. There was nothing openly political but the subtext was: “It’s better to lick ice-cream than the president’s ass!” The security services made many arrests, but their actions were captured in photos that were posted on LiveJournal and on photo-sharing websites like Flickr. Western bloggers and then traditional media picked up the news, drawing attention to the harsh crackdown.
• Details of this rebellion have since been celebrated by a cadre of mostly western thinkers who believe that digital activism can help to topple authoritarian regimes. Belarusian flash mobs are invoked to illustrate how a new generation of decentralised protesters, armed only with technology, can oppose the state in ways unthought of in 1968 or 1989.
• But these digital enthusiasts rarely tell you what happened next.
• In October, I was invited to testify to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Washington DC—a hotchpotch of US congressmen, diplomats and military officials. The group was holding a hearing titled: “Twitter Against Tyrants: New Media in Authoritarian Regimes.” I would once have happily accepted the premise, but recently my thinking has changed.
• Enthusiasm for the idea of digital revolution abounds.
• From 2006-08 I worked on western-funded internet projects in the former Soviet Union—most with a “let’s-promote-democracy-through-blogs” angle. But last year I quit. Our mission to use the internet to nudge citizens of authoritarian regimes to challenge the status quo had so many unexpected consequences that, at times, it seemed to be hurting the very causes we were trying to promote.
• At the hearing, I was the lonely voice of dissent in a sea of optimism. In one speech, Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican known for his conservative Christian views, implored us to “tear down the new walls of the 21st century, the cyber-walls and electronic censorship technology used by tyrants.”
• Jon Stewart, host of the satirical programme The Daily Show, recently poked fun at a similar suggestion from a congressman that the web was freeing the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?”
• The majority of the media, so cranky when reporting the internet’s impact on their industry, keep producing tear-jerking examples of the marriage of political protest and social media.
• And what a list it is: Burmese monks defying an evil junta with digital cameras; Filipino teenagers using SMS to create a “textual revolution;” Egyptian activists using encryption to hide from the all-seeing-eye of the Mukhabarat; even Brazilian ecologists using Google maps to show deforestation in the Amazon delta. And did I mention Moldova, China and Iran? These cyber-dissidents, we are told, now take their struggles online, swapping leaflets for Twitter updates and ditching fax machines for iPhones.
• But that isn’t what happened in Belarus. After the first flash mob, the authorities began monitoring By_mob, the LiveJournal community where the activities were announced. The police started to show up at the events, often before the flashmobbers did. Not only did they detain participants, but they too took photos. These—along with the protesters’ own online images—were used to identify troublemakers, many of whom were then interrogated by the KGB, threatened with suspension from university, or worse. This intimidation didn’t go unnoticed. Soon, only hardcore activists would show up. Social media created a digital panopticon that thwarted the revolution: its networks, transmitting public fear, were infiltrated and hopelessly outgunned by the power of the state.
• Despite what digital enthusiasts tell you, the emergence of new digital spaces for dissent also lead to new ways of tracking it. Analogue activism was pretty safe: if one node in a protest network got busted, the rest of the group was probably OK.
• But getting access to an activist’s inbox puts all their interlocutors in the frame, too.
• The result is a cat-and-mouse game in which protesters try to hide from the authorities by carving out unconventional niches.
• In Iran, dissidents used to be active on Goodreads, an international social networking website for book-lovers. Here they quietly engaged in conversations about politics and culture, unseen by the censors—that is, until the Los Angeles Times helpfully published an article about what was going on, tipping the authorities off.
• Social networking, then, has inadvertently made it easier to gather intelligence about activist networks. Even a tiny security flaw in the settings of one Facebook profile can compromise the security of many others.
• A study by two MIT students, reported in September, showed it is possible to predict a person’s sexual orientation by analysing their Facebook friends; bad news for those in regions where homosexuality carries the threat of beatings and prison.
• And many authoritarian regimes are turning to data-mining companies to help them identify troublemakers. TRS Technologies in China is one such company. It boasts that “thanks to our technology, the work of ten internet cops can now be done by just one.”
• This does not mean that cyber dissent is an illusion.
• There are three main strands to the “democracy by tweets” theory.
• First, despite my caveats, the internet can if used properly give dissidents secure and cheap tools of communication. Russian activists can use hard-to-tap Skype in place of insecure phone lines, for example. Dissidents can encrypt emails, distribute anti-government materials without leaving a paper trail, and use clever tools to bypass internet filters. It’s now easier to be a “one-man NGO”: with Google Docs, you can do your own printing, lowering the risk of leaks.
• Second, new technology makes bloody crackdowns riskier, as police are surrounded by digital cameras and pictures can quickly be sent to western news agencies. Some governments, like Burma and North Korea, don’t care about looking brutal, but many others do.
• Third, technology reduces the marginal cost of protest, helping to turn “fence-sitters” into protesters at critical moments. An apolitical Iranian student, for instance, might find that all her Facebook friends are protesting and decide to take part.
• Thanks to the internet, governments have lost their monopoly on controlling information, while citizens have acquired access to other sources of knowledge and the ability to organise more safely.
• Discovering others of like mind, they will see the protests and, if the regime hasn’t responded with violence, join to create a “snowball” capable of crushing the most rigid authoritarian structure.
• Social scientists have named these snowballs “information cascades.” They explain why, when most citizens may believe that a revolution will not succeed, they will still pour into the streets if everyone else is protesting; so many people can’t be wrong.
• It’s not hard to see how the internet might amplify information cascades and so strengthen the position of activists. The point is made most famously by the American web guru Clay Shirky. He is a darling of the social media world, a consultant for government, corporate and philanthropic bodies, and a source for reporters seeking quotes on how the internet is changing protest.
• He is also the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet.
• Shirky adapted Lohmann’s theories for the age of MySpace in his bestseller Here Comes Everybody (2008). The major lesson he drew from Leipzig is that people should “protest in ways that the state was unlikely to interfere with, and distribute evidence of their actions widely.”
• Why? Protesters are in a win-win situation: “If the state didn’t react, the documentation would serve as evidence that the protesting was safe. If the state did react, then the documentation of the crackdown could be used to spur an international outcry.”
• But the truth is often different. In Belarus, most fence-sitters watched the state’s response and, acting rationally, went searching for higher fences. In Iran this year, the famous photograph of Neda Agha-Soltan, murdered in the streets, went viral and became a symbol of the “green revolution.” Whether it encouraged any fence-sitters is much less obvious.
• Information cascades often fail to translate into crowds, even without state fear-mongering. Last year’s anti-Farc protests in Colombia—aided by Facebook—attracted huge crowds. But this year’s anti-Chávez protests did not, although they were organised by the same group using the same methods. The aim was for 50m people to rally worldwide but only a few thousand turned up. The same has been true when people have tried to organise protests in Azerbaijan and Russia.
• Yet even if the internet doesn’t always bring people out onto the streets, its adherents have another, subtler argument. For democracy to succeed, they say, you need civil movements to help make protests more intense, frequent and well-attended. A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties. In authoritarian states—or so the story goes—it is largely up to lone individuals, who often get locked up as a result.
• Yet if citizens can form ad-hoc groups, gain access to unbiased information and connect with each other, challenges to the state become more likely. And social theorists like Robert Putnam argue that the emergence of such groups increases social capital and trust among citizens.
• It is true that the internet is building what I call “digital civic infrastructure”—new ways to access data and networks to distribute it. This logic underlies many western efforts to reshape cyberspace in authoritarian states.
• The British foreign secretary David Miliband has enthused about the potential of the communications revolution to “fuel the drive for social justice.”
• “If it’s true that there are more bloggers per head of population in Iran than in any other country, this makes me optimistic,” he has also said.
• In early November, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced Civil Society 2.0, a project to help grassroots organisations around the world use digital technology, which will include tuition in online campaigning and how to leverage social networks.
• The first snag is that turning the internet into a new platform for civic participation requires certainty that only pro-western and pro-democracy forces will participate.
• Most authoritarian societies, however, defy easy classification into the “good guys vs bad guys” paradigms of the Bush era.
• In Egypt, for example, the extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a political force—albeit mostly missing from the Egyptian parliament—that can teach Hosni Mubarak a lesson about civic participation. It has an enviable digital presence and a sophisticated internet strategy: for example, campaigning online to get activists released from prison. Western governments shouldn’t be surprised when groups like this become the loudest voices in new digital spaces: they are hugely popular and are commonly denied a place in the heavily policed traditional public sphere.
• Similarly, the smartest and most active user of new media in Lebanon is not the western-backed government of Saad Hariri, but the fundamentalist troublemakers of Hizbullah, whose suave manipulation of cyberspace was on display during the 2006 war with Israel.
• In Russia, the internet has given a boost to extreme right-wing groups like the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, which has been using Google Maps to visualise the location of ethnic minorities in Russian cities and encouraging its members to hound them out.
• Criminal gangs in Mexico are fond of YouTube, where they flaunt their power by uploading videos of their graphic killings.
• Generally, in the absence of strong democratic norms and institutions, the internet has fuelled a drive for vigilante justice rather than the social variety Miliband was expecting.
• And it doesn’t help that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can launch a cyber-attack on a sovereign nation.
• Last year I took part in one—purely for the sake of experiment—on the websites of the Georgian government.
• The results of the attack were unclear. For a brief period some government emails and a few dozen websites were either slow or unavailable; some Georgian banks couldn’t offer online services for a short period.
• Yet while the internet may take the power away from an authoritarian (or any other) state or institution, that power is not necessarily transferred to pro-democracy groups.
• Social media’s greatest assets—anonymity, “virality,” interconnectedness—are also its main weaknesses.
• But the advent of blogging and social networking has also made it easier for the state to plant and promote its own messages, spinning and neutralising online discussions before they translate into offline action.
• Governments have long lost absolute control over how the information spreads online, and extirpating it from blogs is no longer a viable option. Instead, they fight back. It is no trouble to dispatch commentators to accuse a dissident of being an infidel, a sexual deviant, a criminal, or worst of all a CIA stooge
• Moreover, the distracting noise of the internet—the gossip, pornography, and conspiracy theories—can act as a de-politicising factor. Providing unfettered access to information is not by itself going to push citizens of authoritarian states to learn about their government’s crimes.
• most people, whether in democracies or not, prefer to read about trivia and what’s useful in daily life—restaurant and film reviews and so on—than about the tedious business of governance.
• One study from early 2007, by a Saudi academic, showed that 70 per cent of all content swapped by Saudi teenagers via Bluetooth was pornographic.
• Government-controlled internet providers in Belarus, for example, run dedicated servers full of pirated digital goodies for their clients to download for free. Under this new social contract, internet users are allowed plenty of autonomy online—just so long as they don’t venture into politics.
• We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Nobody knows how to create sustainable digital public spheres capable of promoting democracy.
• Despite millions of dollars poured into the former Soviet Union, NGO-funded new media projects that are alive and kicking a year after the original grant has ended can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
• As Twitter and Facebook emerge as platforms for cyber-activism in authoritarian states, it is essential they are aware of their new global obligations, including the need to protect the data entrusted to them by activists.
• Some consistency in dealing with cyber-attacks is also needed. If we treat cyber-attacks that Russian nationalists launch on Estonian or Georgian targets as crimes, we cannot approve when our own “hacktivists” launch similar attacks on Iranian government websites.
• nd western governments should refrain from confirming paranoid autocrats’ theories about a Twitter revolution, thus necessitating a crackdown.
• During the Iran protests this year, the US state department called Twitter executives and asked them to delay maintenance of the site so Iranians could continue using it to protest. There was no better way to confirm Iranian suspicions that the US government was somehow behind the protest.
• Let us in future be a bit more sceptical about the need to recreate the protest wheel. In almost all countries run by authoritarian regimes there is an untapped mass of activists, dissidents, and anti-government intellectuals who have barely heard of Facebook.

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• Written on November 19, 2009 <!-- by -->

    

   

  As some of you my know, my essay about the Internet in authoritarian states is the cover story of December issue of Prospect. Patrick Meier wrote a long post, raising some issues about my arguments
• My remarks about the latter were actually used to indicate that by torturing activists, authorities can now get access to their passwords, social networks, inboxes, etc - and thus get hold of the entire networks. This actually only strengthens my argument that analogue activism was much safer.
• The work that Nathan Freitas and others are doing to make communications more secure is important - no disagreement there.
• I doubt that any regular users of the Internet in Russia, China or Iran have ever heard of what Freitas is doing or are going to use those services anytime soon.
• The reason why I quote from Lohmann’s paper is not because there is nothing more current but because that paper triggered a whole body of scholarship on the use of information cascades in protests (Google Scholar identifies 173 papers quoting it). Most recently, it was invoked by Clay Shirky in his popular book “Here Comes Everybody”. Patrick has completely omitted that fact in his review. Had Clay not based his argument in the book on Lohmann’s paper, I would probably not have mentioned it, as it was brought up in a section about Shirky.
• Patrick misrepresents what I wrote about the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar groups. The point was not that they are using it in their daily operations- that’s a well-known fact - but that they are filling in the vacuum left by the state, and that one consequence of promoting “civil society 2.0″ would be that these groups, who arguably actually are civil society, will rise to fill in the void.

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• Activism has evolved.  Although the old fashioned means of door knocking, calling, protesting, and speaking out in public are still the most important element that can help shape the debate and change some undecided minds, we have a new realm where we can make a difference: the internet.
• This chart displays how people share content in the web:
• 

• DIGG

   

  The reason why I use http://digg.com/ is two fold.  First off, each story submitted has a wonderful comments section where you can have a real discussion about the story, its ramifications, and is a great place to meet some like-minded people.

   

  Second, and more important to the overall realm of internet activism, is that digg has the potential to spread information to a far wider audience than any of the other social networking sites.  It does this by the power of the Front Page.  It works like this, you submit an article to digg, then users can give it a thumbs up (digg it) or a thumbs down (bury it).  If a submit gets enough positive diggs in a certain span of time (usually ~24 hours), it will hit the Front Page, exposing it to many thousands of people and give it a huge boost on google searches (by having a higher page rank), exposing it to tens of thousands more.  I’ve also noticed that the debates on digg often help shape the greater message on the cable news channels, and some of us have been cited by the MSM before.
• I’ve seen far too many very important stories simply not get any attention on Digg because the submitter doesn’t support anyone else, so in turn has a hard time gathering 10 or 20 digs, where to get it to the front page where it will get exposure to thousands, a critical mass of ~100 diggs is usually required.  Help each other out folks.  Once you get the RSS feeds set up and organized, it’s very easy to keep up with your friends and become a more effective digger.

• USE TWITTER TO PROMOTE PROGRESSIVE CONTENT

   

  There was a time when you could contact your digg friends directly via a ‘shout’ system on the site.  Digg shouts have gone the way of the dinosaur, so in order to promote your stories, Twitter seems to be the mode everyone is migrating to in order to direct traffic to digg submits.

• #HASHTAGS

   

   

  Hashtags just mean putting a # before a word so that it more easily searched at places like: http://search.twitter.com/ and http://www.hashtags.org/ An incomplete, short list of  important hashtags to use are:

   

  #p2 #topprog #rebelleft progressive issues

   

  #digg #digguser #diggmates let ppl know it’s a digg submit

   

  #hcr #hc09 #healthcare #singlepayer #publicoption for health care reform

   

  #green #eco #enviro #cc #wildlife green, ecological, environmental, climate change

   

  #mmot #marijuana #legalization #norml #pot #drugwar #weed legalization issues

   

  #atheists #agnostic #secular #deist #pagan various non-religious umbrellas

   

  #fem2 #FAB #WOC #prochoice various womens and reproductive issues

   

  #LGBT #equalrights LGBT civil rights

   

  #EFCA #unions #aflcio #seiu #ufcw #ibew workers rights and unions

   

  #RI4A #dreamact #immigration immigration reform

   

  
  

   

  #followfriday  (or #FF) great way to find other recommended tweeters

   

  #SameSexSundays (or #SSS) find #lgbt and #= #equalrights folks on Sundays

   

  #EcoMonday find green, environmental activists on Mondays

   

  #ProgressiveTuesday network with progressives on Tuesdays

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• New media has created significant  opportunities for advancing freedom in countries ruled by authoritarian  regimes.  It has expanded the space for free expression and facilitated civic activism.  But authoritarian regimes have pushed back.
• While new media plays an important role in expanding free expression and  facilitating citizen engagement, it does not drive political change.  New media  alone cannot undermine authoritarian regimes.  Authoritarian regimes in the  former Soviet republics and elsewhere continue to repress their citizens, and  this repression extends to digital media.
• In Belarus, authorities conduct surveillance on Internet users, and they  require cyber cafés to register each user’s browsing history.
• Authoritarian regimes use a variety of methods  to limit online freedom of expression.  The United States therefore has to  respond in multiple ways.

  • It is amusing to see how the U.S. is automatically exempted from any critiques of authoritarianism, as if it was playing the role of benevolent international saviour of all people's living under "authoritarian" regimes. Interesting to see such Bush-think make its way into academic discourse.
  Add Sticky Note
• The Internet is a medium for communication.  Its impact in authoritarian regimes ultimately depends less on the medium itself than on the messages it  conveys and on the messengers who use it to drive progress towards democracy.

• Maximilian Forte   // January 7, 2010 at 2:39 pm | Reply

   

  Regarding the fourth bullet point above:

   

  It is amusing to see how the U.S. is automatically exempted from any critiques of authoritarianism, as if it was playing the role of benevolent international saviour of all people’s living under “authoritarian” regimes. Interesting to see such Bush-think make its way into academic discourse.

   

  And to which “authoritarian regimes” must the U.S. “respond”? Its allies? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Kuwait?

   

  Trying to/playing at divorcing one’s politics from a discussion of politics is not the way to go, and needs to be attended to well before one even thinks of going the route of getting “civil resistance” and “digital activism” to cross-fertilize each other (which, incidentally, suggests a lack of fertility in both, or a genetic deficiency — one might want to attend to those assumptions first as well).

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• Clay Shirky 

     6th January 2010  —  Issue 166
• Political insurrection is never solely driven by technology. But it is profoundly changing the landscape of modern protest—in favour of those fighting for democracy
• In “Why the internet is failing Iran’s activists” Evegeny Morozov argues that the protests which took place in the streets of Tehran in November 2009 may not have been triggered by social media—a sentiment with which I am in complete agreement.
• Just as the printing press didn’t exclusively cause the Protestant Reformation, the source of those protests in Tehran, as with all protests, was the willingness of the people to defy their government.
• The crucial point to glean from the protests of 2009 is that, just as the Protestant Reformation was shaped by the printing press, the Iranian insurrection was and is being shaped by social media.
• While the use of social media in the Iranian protests quickly garnered the label “Twitter Revolution,” the real revolution was the use of mobile phones, which allowed the original protesters to broadcast their actions to other citizens and to the wider world with remarkable speed and immediacy. This characteristic, of a rapidly assembling and self-documenting public, is more than just a new slogan.
• The basic hypothesis is an updated version of that outlined by Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 publication, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. A group of people, so Habermas’s theory goes, who take on the tools of open expression becomes a public, and the presence of a synchronised public increasingly constrains undemocratic rulers while expanding the rights of that public (the monarchies of Europe, in Habermas’s telling, become authoritarian governments within the contemporary scenario). Put another way, even taking into account the increased availability of surveillance, the net value of social media has shifted the balance of power in the direction of Iran’s citizens.
• As Evgeny notes, however, that hypothesis might be wrong. Or, if it is right, the ways in which it is right might be minor, or rare, or take decades to unfold.
• Yet while the Ahmadinejad regime is clearly willing to use event-based internet filtering, whereby mobile network coverage or internet access is temporarily blocked—a strategy we might call a “temporary Burma”—I do not believe that Iran can become a “permanent Burma.
• Such shutdowns, if widespread or long term, would amount to what we might call a ”technological auto-immune disease,” both because daily life in Tehran affords so many more opportunities for public assembly, and because however willing Ahmadinejad is to hold onto power, the Iranian state has gone considerably further than Burma in resting its legitimacy on both elections and nominally neutral theocrats. Both of these pillars are, however, being shaken.

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• Clay Shirky 

     11th December 2009  —  Issue 165
• Media guru Clay Shirky responds to criticisms in Evgeny Morozov’s December cover story on why dictators benefit from the web. Despite pitfalls, he says, the internet remains a positive force for democracy
• In Prospect’s December cover story, “How dictators watch us on the web”, Evgeny Morozov criticises my views on the impact of social media on political unrest. Indeed, he even says I am “the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet.” In part, I would like to agree with some of his criticisms, while partially disputing some of his assertions too.
• Let me start with a basic statement of belief: because civic life is not just created by the actions of individuals, but by the actions of groups, the spread of mobile phones and internet connectivity will reshape that civic life, changing the ways members of the public interact with one another.
• Crucially however, Morozov’s reading is in response to a specific strain of internet utopianism—let’s call it the “just-add-internet” hypothesis. In this model, the effect of social media on the lives of citizens in authoritarian regimes will be swift, unstoppable, and positive—a kind of digitised 1989. And it will lead us to expect the prominence of social media in any society’s rapid democratisation.
• While this argument is overtly simplistic, I have nonetheless helped fuel it by discussing mechanisms through which citizens can coordinate group action, while failing to note the ways that visible public action also provides new counter-moves to repressive regimes. Morozov is right to criticise me for this imbalance, and for the resulting (and undue) optimism it engenders about social media as a democratising force; I stand corrected.
• Nevertheless, I want to defend the notion—which Morozov goes after in the “man most responsible for intellectual confusion” section of his essay—that social media improves political information cascades, as outlined by the political scientist Susanne Lohmann. It also represents a new dynamic within political protest, which will alter the struggle between insurrectionists and the state, even if the state wins in any given clash.
• Morozov introduces both the Belarusian and Iranian protests as examples of places where this struggle can be seen. The October Square protests in Minsk in 2006 did not, however, destabilise the Lukashenko government, and surveillance of the mob on LiveJournal helped limit use of flash mob techniques by protesters. The flash mob participants were not able to use either the offensive or defensive capabilities of social media to permanent advantage—there is not enough discontent in the rest of the population to cause them to join in, the government’s reaction was sufficiently swift and harsh, and documentation of those events did not resonate outside the country.
• Sadly for residents of Belarus, leaders of countries with low geopolitical importance will always find it easier to deflect democratic movements, social media or no, than leaders in more strategically vital countries. The case of Belarus is therefore one in which protesters have been given new capabilities for organising, but where the state’s reaction has remained effective. In the arms race in Minsk, the tools have changed, but the end result resembles the old equilibrium state. This is the kind of outcome whose strategic ramifications Morozov has highlighted better than anyone.
• The Iranian situation, which Morozov also mentions, is much more complex: the government relies more on its perceived legitimacy, both democratic and theocratic, than Belarus. Moreover, Iran’s geopolitical importance is paramount on many fronts at once. Clearly, the protests following the 12th June elections were aided by social media. Although Twitter got top billing in western accounts, the most important tools during the Tehran protests were mobile phones, whether to send text messages, photos, or videos. Twitter, predominantly, was a gateway to western attention.
• Insurrections, even pro-democracy insurrections, always begin as minority affairs, driven by a small, young, and well-educated population before they expand more widely. In the Iranian case, once the information about general discontent had successfully cascaded, the coordination among the populace remained intact, even when the tools which helped disseminate that information were shut down.
• It is impossible to know how the next few months in Iran will unfold, but the use of social media has already passed several tests: it has enabled citizens to coordinate with one another better than previously, to broadcast events like Basij violence or the killing of Neda Aga Soltan to the rest of the world, and, by forcing the regime to shut down communications apparatus, the protesters have infected Iran with a kind of technological auto-immune disease. However great the regime’s short-term desire to keep the protesters from communicating with one another, a modern economy simply cannot function if people can’t use their phones. The regime may yet crush protests, but even if they do, the events of June to November this year will still have broken the old illusion of a happy balance between democratic, theocratic, and military power in Iran.
• I accept Morozov’s criticism of Here Comes Everybody. That book was about social media rather than politics—it was an imbalanced account of the arms race between citizens and their governments. However, even within the logic of the arms race, the easier the assembly of citizens, the more ubiquitous the ability to document atrocities. And the more the self-damaging measures which states take—like shutting down mobile phones networks—will resolve themselves as a net advantage for insurrection within authoritarian regimes. Net advantage, in some cases, is a far cry from the “just-add-internet” hypothesis, but it is a view that is considerably more optimistic about the balance of power between citizens and the state than Morozov’s.

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• 03 November 2009

• State Department on Civil Society 2.0 Initiative

  Initiative to help grassroots organizations use digital technology
• U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
  Office of the Spokesman
  For Immediate Release
  November 3, 2009
• Secretary Clinton Announces Civil Society 2.0 Initiative to Build Capacity of Grassroots Organizations
• In her remarks today to the Forum for the Future, Secretary Clinton announced Civil Society 2.0, which will help grassroots organizations around the world use digital technology to tell their stories, build their memberships and support bases, and connect to their community of peers around the world.
• Building the capacity of grassroots civil society organizations will enable them to do the work that, in the past, Western NGOs and governments have done. With increased capacity, communities are better able to initiate, administer and sustain their own programs and solutions to shared problems.
• “Civil Society 2.0” includes the following components:

• 1. Deploying a team of experienced technologists to work with civil society organizations around the globe to provide training and support to build their digital capacity. The competencies developed in the trainings will include:

   

  • How to build a website

   

  • How to blog

   

  • How to launch a text messaging campaign

   

  • How to build an online community

   

  • How to leverage social networks for a cause
• 2. Partnering these technologists with local civil society organizations and governments to develop and implement technology-based solutions to local problems.
• 3. Publishing interactive “how to” programs and curriculum online to help organizations that do not have access to in-person assistance.
• 4. Creating a curated open platform that allows any citizen or company to develop, share or suggest content for the curriculum.
• 5. Allocating $5 million in grant funds for pilot programs in the Middle East and North Africa that will bolster the new media and networking capabilities of civil society organizations and promote online learning in the region.
• The United States is a strong supporter of civil society around the world. Civil society activists and organizations work to improve the quality of people’s lives and protect their rights, hold leaders accountable to their constituents, shine light on abuses in both the public and private sectors, and advance the rule of law and social justice. They are key partners for progress.
• The Forum for the Future is a joint civil society initiative of the countries of the Broader Middle East and North Africa region (BMENA) and the Group of Eight (G8).  It brings together leaders from government, civil society and the private sector to exchange ideas and form partnerships to support progress, reform, and expanded opportunities for the people of the region.

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• How the U.S. State Department should enable and encourage social-networking sites in the global fight for freedom.
• BY U.S. SEN. RICHARD G. LUGAR |   JANUARY 6, 2010
• During the turmoil that followed Iran's disputed 2009 presidential election, thousands of opposition supporters and other protesters communicated and organized through Twitter. So important was this social networking site to supporting the pro-democracy "green movement" that the U.S. State Department contacted corporate representatives of Twitter to ask them to delay a routine maintenance shutdown of the microblogging site.
• In the strife-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, U.S. officials are working with radio and cell-phone operators to reach isolated militia fighters with messages from former combatants now urging them to put down their arms and return to civilian life.
• In Pakistan, the State Department paid for 24 million text messages as a way to help support a new mobile-phone-based social network, Humari Awaz, or "Our Voice." The gesture helps increase U.S. government engagement with the Pakistani people, strengthens communities, and can assist small businesses in gaining better market information.
• These are just some of the latest examples of what is being called "21st-century statecraft," using the capabilities of modern communications and social networking technologies to win hearts and minds and improve the American image abroad.
• It represents an important leap forward from traditional U.S. outreach efforts, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.
• The adroit use of social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and others, coupled with text messages and increasingly widespread mobile-phone technology, can help lend support to existing grassroots movements for freedom and civil rights, connect people to information, and help those in closed societies communicate with the outside world.
• The World Bank estimates that for every 10 percent increase in the number of mobile-phone users in a developing country, there is nearly a 1 percent increase in its economic output.
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has championed the use of communications technology in diplomacy and development. In November in Morocco, she announced the "Civil Society 2.0" initiative, which will offer training and advice to local nongovernmental organizations around the world on how to use the Internet and other digital media to organize, communicate, and be more effective.
• She has also appointed a special advisor for innovation, Alec Ross, to examine ways to employ communications technology to enhance traditional diplomatic and development activities. In a recent speech, he said that the State Department is using "these new connection technologies to engage and empower our interlocutors in new and different ways that are consistent with our foreign policy goals."
• The applications vary widely. In Mexico, for instance, where drug-related crime and violence is at crisis level, the United States is helping set up a mobile-phone-based system so citizens can report crimes and tips anonymously.
• In Afghanistan, the State Department and the Pentagon are working with the private sector to expand mobile-phone banking, an innovation that has been successful in Africa. The hope is to improve the finances of people in rural conflict areas. When violence displaced up to 2 million people from Pakistan's Swat Valley, the State Department quickly set up a mobile texting system so concerned Americans could make $5 donations for refugee relief with just a few keystrokes.
• Technology offers new ways to perform the traditional task of spreading the American message
• During President Barack Obama's major Africa speech in Ghana last year, for instance, the government offered SMS texts of his remarks in English and French to cell-phone users across Africa and enabled them to post questions and comments.
• But social networking technologies are more often used to enable individuals across a country, or across the globe, to interact, engage, and become empowered.
• Although this means that our government will not be able to control the message as well as it might with conventional public diplomacy tools, I believe it is a risk worth taking.
• Terrorists and other anti-American propagandists have for some time been using the Internet and other techniques to communicate and recruit. America needs to beat them at their own game, especially since we invented most of the technology.
• I would encourage the administration and our diplomats to be nimble, flexible, and innovative as they pursue a wide range of foreign-policy initiatives that use these new communication and connection techniques. Diplomacy and development are our best means of winning the global war of ideas, and we must come to the battle armed with the most modern tools at our disposal.

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• By Will Heaven: Will Heaven December 17th 2009
• What if Twitter had been around during the Spanish Civil War? Would George Orwell have journeyed to Catalonia to fight the fascists? Perhaps not. Judging by events in 2009, maybe “@GeorgeOrwell“ would simply have tinged his avatar red and used the hashtag #spanishcivilwar to undermine his Nationalist enemy.
• This year has been a  good one for chubby armchair activists. They’ve found new outlets for their impotent do-goodery in social media. The use of Twitter during the Iranian post-election protests, for example, recently won a Webby Award (yes, really) for being “one of the top ten internet moments of the decade”. Let me tell you why I find that deeply depressing.
• There wasn’t a revolution in Iran. There was only violently suppressed protest: death sentences and lengthy jail terms for opponents of the Mullahs’ regime; young women raped and beaten in Tehran’s darkest prisons; dormitories raided and ransacked at the country’s universities; and long lists of missing men and women, many of them presumed dead and buried in mass graves. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, to view that as a victory is as deluded as it is naive.
• Did Twitter and other online networks threaten the brutal Islamist regime? Not this time. The Ahmadinejad-led dictatorship continues to thrive, backed by volunteer militias. And an Iranian democracy is no closer to reality than it was in January. So if the “Twitter revolution” was all the internet could muster in the last decade – and if it’s something we’re supposed to be proud of – then we may as well all log off in the New Year.
• One of the errors of the Noughties has been to overestimate the internet’s power to change the political world. The result of this error is overwhelmingly repellent: we are more aware than ever of the world’s problems  - but we have fooled ourselves into thinking that Tweets, Facebooks groups and other online tools will magically sort them out. They won’t. It’s dangerous, not to mention intolerably lazy, to think otherwise.
• So next time an armchair activist tells you that his twibbon or his Facebook group will change the world, think again. Old-school methods might be helped by the internet, but ultimately free democracy occurs offline. No Webby award can rival it.

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• As the New York Times reported this weekend
• Ian Urbina’s New York Times story

• Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.

   

  So what?
• the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.
• Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work.
• I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.
• Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors.
• They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.
• Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.
• Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action.
• Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure.
• merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.
• My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change.
• Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.
• While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.
• These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens.
• I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events.
• This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.

• Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:

   

   Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. 
• If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?
• I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.
• Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition?
• So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.
• Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?
• Sue Says:    
       November 20th, 2009 at 2:45 pm     

  The group 350.org is one of the best examples of using internet organization to disseminate an idea–that policymakers need to use 350 ppm when determining limits to CO2–and gather a vast and diverse collection of people all over the world to demand action. Starting from basically nowhere, a group of 6 recent college graduates essentially organized the world: 5200+ actions in 181 countries on the same day, countries that included the Congo, Iraq, Pakistan, China and other places where concerted environmental activism is basically unheard of. If you go to the 350.org website you can see the 21,000 photos they produced, documenting their efforts. While, obviously, the 350 ppm position hasn’t been adopted yet, these efforts inspired entire governments to participate and sanction events, the Secretary General of the UN to applaud the effort, and people in the poorest places to have their voices heard in a large international arena–all good things. And with the 350 ppm concept now out in the world, it has become a measure against which the treaty writers’ work will be judged.
• Seth Finkelstein Says:    
       November 21st, 2009 at 6:14 am     

  “does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition?”

   

  Of course it does, unless the person is a marketer crafting a better sales-pitch (”interest”), or an academic valuing learning for its own sake (”knowledge”). In fact, taken to the limit, this is a justification for a bad kind of self-indulgence – talk endlessly about a topic, then vigorously pat on back for having generated interest and knowledge among the talkers and their audience.

• “And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions.”

   

  Well, one problem is that much (granted not all, not you) of the Berkman Center is caught up in what’s been called “the liberation theology of the Net”, with too many people basing their career advancement and financial success on spinning appealing tales which fit with what others want to hear. They are completely impervious to contrary data, having developed a whole line of hucksterism to wall-off reality – doing two-steps between hype and triviality, blather about early days, much rhetorical sophistry, etc. This time it’s different!
• I mean, it’s not like these questions have never been studied before. The problem is that you’re likely to come up with an answer that’s not profitable, and hence money and power is going to provide incentives to get the wrong answer. Yes, I know, there’s a lot of complexity in the process, but disclaimer, this is a blog comment, not a book.
• Kevin Donovan Says:    
       November 21st, 2009 at 8:39 am     

  “Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition?”

   

  I don’t think those people with green avatars or Facebook group membership are actually expecting to overthrow Ahmedinejad or ban Obieng from traveling. More often, it is the media and pundits that assign a transformative expectation to digital activism. The practitioners, especially the masses (not the organizers), are often more interested in doing simply what you say: raising awareness and knowledge.

   

  Take, for example, the comment from the green avatar guy on a recent post of mine; he wanted to raise awareness: http://blurringborders.com/2009/10/19/not-every-digitally-mediated-act-is-a-political-one/#disqus_thread
• Seth Finkelstein Says:    
       November 21st, 2009 at 1:05 pm     

  Kevin, that’s indeed a very interesting article. I was struck by this part:

   

  “It isn’t, as Evgeny writes, that “our digital efforts make us feel very useful and important but have zero social impact.” Instead, it is that the digital acts are innately social that they have impact, but for important personal social interests, not necessarily wider societal goals.”

   

  The writer did a rhetorical twist on the phrase “social impact”, fogging it between the political/civic meaning and the personal/chat meaning. He might just as well have as “Sure they have a social benefit, people feeling like they did something is beneficial to them”.

   

  That is, he didn’t refute what Evgeny meant, but rather substituted a different meaning associated with the same string of words, which then gives the impression he refuted it.

   

  Ethan – See the sophistry problem?

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• By Evgeny Morozov       Thursday, November 19, 2009
• I've been taking quite a lot of heat lately for a somewhat promiscuous use of anecdotes in my quest to push against "Internet helps democracy" meme (see, for example, David Sasaki of Global Voices here and Patrick Meier of DigiActive here and here - Patrick's are responses to my cover story in the December issue of Prospect; I also responded to him already on my blog).
• To summarize, in his two responses Patrick vehemently attacks me for basking in "anecdotal heaven" - as opposed, of course, to the "data hell" that he finds himself in - and does this probably a dozen times (and I do feel sorry for him - I hope Tufts, where he's completing his PhD, will compensate him adequately for this struggle against anecdotes).
• Let me make a confession first: I love sound and informative data as much as the next guy. However, when the data is missing, I don't bite my lips - like some academics do - and strive to stimulate and enhance public debate instead. Why? Because it doesn't really matter what I decide to do in the end - CNN, FoxNews and others would invariably jump to conclusions about the "Twitter revolution in Iran" or the brave Chinese bloggers taking on the government. Normally, they would also completely disregard whatever complexities and local nuances are usually present in authoritarian countries.
  
• My choice is to step into the fray, take the risk of being wrong (as I have been - for example, on the question of the Twitter revolution in Moldova), and try to introduce a more nuanced perspective on the role/use of technologies. This way, the public can at least hear a more nuanced perspective.
• The major problem with Patrick's criticism of my methods - which I think is representative of the new media academia in general -  is that he believes in a world where not taking a public position - however flawed your data or arguments are - is a far better option than joining the public debate with imperfect data and arguments.
• to let much of the digital hysteria over the Internet's impact on democracy to go unchallenged, unchecked, and unverified is simply too demanding of a thing to ask , because decisions taken by funders, governments, and NGOs have repercussions far beyond their control.
• Had Patrick decided to drop his numerous extracurricular activities and instead get us his magic data two years ago, I would have been perfectly happy to quote it when I got on television or the radio to discuss Iran or Moldova. Unfortunately, neither television nor radio would wait until Patrick completes his PhD to inform their viewers and listeners about what happened in Iran and what role the Internet played there. That's simply how public debate works in democracies and I frankly do not understand Patrick's problems with it.
• If my critics want me to shut up and cede the microphone to some pundit-robot from a DC think-tank, well, I am not going to do that. And it's not just the media; it's also the government and the foundations - all of those need to quickly digest and interpret the situation to decide what to do next. Unfortunately, they can't wait for 10 years for some academic to tell them the exact role that new media played in Iran. Academics should either step up to the challenge and join the public debate - with data or not - or risk marginalization otherwise.
• Would I feel more comfortable getting someone to pay me to spend the next 10 years to build a model that would tell me little that is new, interesting, or explanatory - just to be on the safer side in a public argument? Probably yes - especially, if I was an academic looking for a cool research gig. But I am not. I am not trying to build a model nor am I trying to test anything. My only function in this debate is to serve as a critic, i.e. take someone's argument, engage with it and spot holes and inconsistencies in its structure. And yes, finding inconsistencies in arguments - at least as far as Karl Popper is concerned - involves finding examples that would disprove the initial hypothesis.
• Why don't I produce any data? Because I wasn't trained to do it, don't want to do it, and don't believe that gathering/testing data on most issues connected to digital activism is going to get us far ahead in this debate. I do not collect data for the same reasons that orchestra conductors do not fly planes. I can, of course, further push the argument that much of the data that is gathered by academics is to a large degree useless and doesn't really tell us much  - but hey, I'll pass on that opportunity here.
• It's a bit silly to think that having over a gazillion data points from a gazillion countries gathered over a gazillion years would illuminate what really happened last summer in Iran. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply spends too much time in academia.
• I doubt that Patrick is the first person to get hurt by my criticism of the field. I can even sense and understand a growing backlash against my ideas because I am attacking many of the key premises on which the very field of digital activism - and much of its philanthropic support - is based. My criticism is certainly not good news for many people working in this field, both from academic, professional, and financial perspectives. But it's their problem not mine. As long as the mainstream media keep producing drivel about the Internet and academics continue shying away from the public debate, I think my role is justified and safe.

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• By Evgeny Morozov       Saturday, September 5, 2009
• Below is the text of a talk about "slacktivism" - a subject that has received considerable attention on this blog and elsewhere - that I delivered at Festival Ars Electronica this morning (the session was dedicated to "cloud intelligence"). 
• As someone who studies how the Internet affects global politics, I've grown increasingly skeptical of numerous digital activism campaigns that attempt to change the world through Facebook and Twitter.
• A few months ago, a Danish psychologist Anders Colding-Jørgensen, who studies how ideas spread online, used Facebook to conduct a little experiment using the Stork Fountain as his main subject. He started a Facebook group, which implied – but never stated so explicitly – that the city authorities were planning to dismantle the fountain, which of course was NEVER the case. He seeded the group to 125 friends who joined in a matter of hours; then it started spreading virally. In the first few days, it immediately went to a 1000 members and then it started growing more aggressively. After 3 days, it began to grow with over 2 new members each minute in the day time. When the group reached 27.500 members, Jørgensen decided to end the experiment. So there you have it: almost 28,000 people joined a cause that didn't really exist! As far as "clouds" go, that one was probably an empty one.

  • The "cause that didn't exist"? It's provocative, but clearly the cause did exist in the minds of the joiners.
  Add Sticky Note
• This broaches an interesting question: why do people join Facebook groups in the first place? In an interview with the Washington Post, Jorgensen said that "just like we need stuff to furnish our homes to show who we are, on Facebook we need cultural objects that put together a version of me that I would like to present to the public."
• Other researchers agree: studies by Sherri Grasmuck, a sociologist at Temple University, reveals that Facebook users shape their online identity implicitly rather than explicitly: that is, the kind of campaigns and groups they join reveals more about who they are than their dull “about me” page.
• This shopping binge in an online identity supermarket has led to the proliferation of what I call “slacktivism”, where our digital effort make us feel very useful and important but have zero social impact.
• When the marginal cost of joining yet another Facebook group are low, we click “yes” without even blinking, but the truth is that it may distract us from helping the same cause in more productive ways.
• Paradoxically, it often means that the very act of joining a Facebook group is often the end – rather than the beginning – of our engagement with a cause, which undermines much of digital activism.
• Take a popular Facebook group "saving the children of Africa." It looks very impressive – over 1.2 million members—until you discover that these compassionate souls have raised about $6,000 (or half a penny per person).
• The problem, however, is that the granularity of contemporary digital activism provides too many easy way-outs: too many people decide to donate a penny where they may otherwise want to donate a dollar.
• So, what exactly plagues most “slacktivist” campaigns? Above all, it's their unrealistic assumption that, given enough awareness, all problems are solvable
• This is precisely what propels many of these campaigns into gathering signatures, adding new members to their Facebook pages, and asking everyone involved to link to the campaign on blogs and Twitter.
• At some point one simply needs to learn how to convert awareness into action – and this is where tools like Twitter and Facebook prove much less useful.
• The advent of micro-donations – whereby one can donate any sum from a few cents to a few dollars – has enabled to raise funds that could then be used – at least, in theory – to further advance the goals of the campaign. The problem is that most of these campaigns do not have clear goals or agenda items beyond awareness-raising.
• Besides, not every problem can be solved with an injection of funds, which, in a way, creates the same problem as awareness-raising: whether it's financial capital or media capital, spending it in a way that would enable social change could be very tough.
• Asking for money could also undermine one's efforts to engage groups members in more meaningful real-life activities: the fact that they have already donated some money, no matter how little, makes them feel as if they have already done their bit and should be left alone.
• Some grassroots campaigns are beginning to realize it: for example, the web-site of "Free Monem", a 2007 pan-Arab initiative to free an Egyptian blogger from jail carried a sign that said “DON'T DONATE; Take action” and had logos of Visa and MasterCard in a crossed red circle in the background. According to Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian Internet activist and one of the organizers of the campaign, this was a way to show that their campaign needed more than money as well as to shame numerous local and international NGOs that like to raise money to “release bloggers from jail”, without having any meaningful impact on the situation on the ground.
• Psychologists offer an interesting explanation as to why a million people working together may be less effective than one person working alone. They call this phenomenon “social loafing”. It was discovered by the French scientist Max Ringelmann in 1913
• The key lesson here is that when everyone in the group performs the same mundane tasks, it's impossible to evaluate individual contributions; thus, people inevitably begin slacking off. Increasing the number of other persons diminishes the relative social pressure on each person. That's, in short, what Ringelmann called “social loafing”.
• once we join a group, we move at the group's own pace, even though we could have been much more effective on our own.
• As you might have heard from Ethan Zuckerman, Facebook and Twitter were not set up for activists by activists; they were set up for the purposes of entertainment and often attracted activists not because they offered unique services but because they were hard to block.
• Thus, we shouldn't take it for granted that Facebook activism is the ultimate limit of what's possible in the digital space; it is just the first layer of what's possible if you work on a budget and do not have much time to plan your campaign.
• So far, the most successful “slacktivist” initiatives have been those that have set realistic expectations and have taken advantage of “slacktivist” inclinations of Internet users rather then deny their existence. For example, FreeRice, a web-site affiliated with the UN Food Program, which contains numerous education games, the most popular of which are those helping you to learn English. While you are doing so, it exposes you to online ads, the proceeds of which go towards purchasing and distributing rice in the poor countries (by FreeRice's estimates, enough rice is being distributed to feed 7,000 people daily).
  
• it's by finding practical hybrid models like FreeRice's that we could convert immense and undeniable collective energy of Internet users into tangible social change.
• So, given all this, how do we avoid “slacktivism” when designing an online campaign? First, make it hard for your supporters to become a slacktivist: don't give people their identity trophies until they have proved their worth. The merit badge should come as a result of their successful and effective contributions to your campaign rather than precede it.
• Second, create diverse, distinctive, and non-trivial tasks; your supporters can do more than just click “send to all” button” all day. Since most digital activism campaigns are bound to suffer from the problem of diffusion of responsibility, make it impossible for your supporters to fade into the crowd and “free ride” on the work of other people.
• Don't give up easily: the giant identity supermarket that Facebook has created could actually be a boon for those organizing a campaign; they just need to figure out a way in which to capitalize on identity aspiration of “slacktivists” by giving them interesting and meaningful tasks that could then be evaluated.
• Third, do not overdose yourself on the Wikipedia model. It works for some tasks but for most – it doesn't. While inserting a comma into yet another trivia article on Wikipedia does help, being yet another invisible “slacktivist” doesn't. Finding the lowest common denominator between a million users may ultimately yield lower results than raising the barrier and forcing the activists to put up more rather than less effort into what they are doing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is insane. Or, worse, a slacker! Thank you.

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