This will be a series of blog posts that I am writing to assist me in the work of developing my book. Basically, I want to engage in a critical analysis, as it pertains to my interest in civics and citizenship education, of some of the key scholars in a range of different fields. I will be aiming to describe their arguments, the relevance of those arguments to my work, and any differing points of view related to the work in question.
This section, on Earl and Kimport’s book Digitally Enabled Social Change will be relevant to Chapter Three: The organizing potential of networks and social media: challenges and opportunities.
One of the more thorough examinations of the role that the internet and social media plays in the formation and organisation of social movements and actvism is Jennifer Earl’s and Katrina Kimport’s Digitally Enabled Social Change. This detailed and comprehensive analysis explores some of the themes raised in the literature about the efficacy of the way that social movements make use of the internet. It returns to the common idea of affordances- those capabilities provided by the technological tools employed by the social movement – in an effort to explore how and why these tools shape the way that activists engage in activism
The first important point that Earl and Kimport make is that there are different kinds of ways that people engage in activism, and these are more or less mediated by the use of technology. The first category are E-mobilisations. These are examples where the internet (usually in the form of a website, social media or both) are used to coordinate an event that largely takes place in a physical space. It is a common form of web activism that is characterised by using ‘online tools to facility an offline protest march and rally’. The second example is E-movements. These examples exist at the opposite end of the spectrum to E-mobilisations. They are activist activities that exist almost entirely online; that is, they are web-based efforts, that are often run by an individual or a handful of individuals – many of whom have only limited experience with social movement organisations,. Finally, between the two poles, there lie E-tactics. These are those actions that have varying degrees of off and online components and varying degrees of affiliation with social movement organisations. Earl and Kimport (2011) describe these as e-tactics; one of their often-referred to examples of such an action is e-petitioning.
Central to the effectiveness of any of these movements, in a digital sense, is how well the affordances of technology are leveraged. An affordances a ‘type of action or characteristic of an action that technology enable through its design.’ The internet has two primary affordances relevant in this case: firstly, it has sharply reduced the cost of creating, organising and participating in protest, but it has also given protesters the ability to aggregate individual actions into a broader collective action. For Earl and Kimport, the type of a protest is in part determined by how effectively these affordances are leveraged. In other words, if these affordances are not leveraged significantly, then the role that the web plays is limited to simply amplifying what might be quite a traditional form of organising. On the other hand, if these affordances are leveraged, then the protest action will be transformed, rather than simply amplified.
Earl and Kimport begin their analysis by provided a detailed history of research into the web, and particularly web activism. They identify the trends in research – the techno-optimists and the techno-cynics – that dominated early research priorities, and then the gradual shift towards a more nuanced understanding about the way that the use of communication networks permitted by the internet might be changing social dynamics – even as people shaped those communication networks. There was, originally, real enthusiasm that the web might enable more direct democracy and grassroots activism, as well as concerns that the web might become a tool used by powerful interests to manipulate the populace. Earl and Kimport also raise the concerns about the artificial division between online and offline activism – variously described as clicktivism and slacktivism. They also engage with the notion of Scale vs Theory 2.0.
The first theory, Scale, is based on the concept that the web simply increases the speed and spread of communication, while reducing costs. Obviously, there are advantages to this for activists and social movement organisations. However, this body of research suggests that there are no qualitative changes in activism because of these changes. In short, the web enables improved communication and participation, but does not fundamentally change how ti takes place.
On the other hand, there is Theory 2.0 Model changes. In this camp, there are more dramatic findings which suggest that scholars need to reconsider their theoretical models of how organising and participation take place, and how best to describe activism. Central to this notion is the idea of a free ride – the concept the people would not take part in activism when they could experience the benefits of other people’s activism without having to pay the costs themselves. However, with Web 2.0, those costs of participating are much lower – and therefore there is less free-riding and more participation – in theory.
However Earl and Kimport are quick to point out that there is not such a chasm between these two points of view. Rather, they argue that the differences in findings can be attributed to the site that have been studied. The Supersize group generally have examined e-mobilizations – which benefit from comparison to traditional models of social movement organising, whereas there is much less research about more recent social movements and how they are using the internet to support e-tactics or e-movements. These, newer, movements are different in approaches and tactics to older social movements, and for Earl and Kimport, that is the crucial point: ‘We hold that it is the harnessing or leveraging of such differences that can perturb previously well-understood social processes, and lead to changes in both processes and our understanding of them’ (p. 33). The site for their research is e-tactics – as an attempt to broaden the field of what is usually considered to be e-activism, but in reality is really limited to e-mobilization, for the most part.
Early and Kimport find that there is always likely to be a mix of supersize effects and theory 2.0 effects because some people don’t notice or make use of the key affordances. However, their study of e-tactics showed that it was possible to make use of two key affordances of technology to undertake meaningful activism. These affordances are lowering costs, and reproving the need for co-presence. The combination of these two affordances may be leading to a ‘new repertoire of contention’ (p. 179)