Posts Tagged ‘digital democracy’

In Mobile Communication by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner (a great introduction to mobile phone scholarship), the authors contrast two social movements facilitated by mobile phones: the 2001 protests in the Philippines which ousted Joseph Estrada and the 2004 demonstrations at the Republic National Convention. Working off a 1975 book, The Strategy of Social Protest, in which William Gamson argues that oppositional movements fail, at least in part, due to their tendency towards factionalization.

“Those protest groups that had the ability to maintain a unified focus and ideology were the most successful. Those that were plagued by competition between different factions were not as successful in carrying out their agenda. Carrying this thought into the realm of personalized mobile communication, it is clear that, while the mobile telephone can help to facilitate the logistics of protest it can also facilitate the logistics of ideological splits.”

They speculate that, compared to the Filipino protests, the RNC protesters did not significantly disrupt the convention because there was no unified focus – environmentalists rubbed shoulders with pacifists who bumped into pro-choice supporters. Although they all opposed the RNC, the protesters never came together for something.

As a specific matter, the choice of the RNC protests has its strengths and weaknesses. If the metric of success was “significant disruption” of the convention, I think the sophistication of the NYPD and fear of ever repeating the 1968 Chicago DNC experience makes such disruption highly unlikely (just as significantly disrupting trade talks after Seattle 1999 is highly unlikely); however, this example is nice because just four years later, many of those discordant protesters were successfully united in opposition to the GOP, this time under the banner of Hope, Change and Obama ’08.

More generally, understanding the relationship between nichification and digital democracy seems like a fruitful exercise. A few years ago, Clay Shirky wrote about the rise of the mega-niche in Wired, and that magazine’s editor, Chris Anderson, made the theory of The Long Tail famous. Both concepts point towards the role of ICTs, and especially the Internet, in facilitating factionalization: I’m a student who cares about the esoteric issue of copyright reform, so I can find an organization especially for students who care about copyright reform.

To what extent is this involvement to the detriment of my broader political engagement, perhaps by isolation in Sunstein’s digital echo chambers? And how do leaders of movements keep them unified? (At least as far as the Obama effort, Micah Sifry has some thoughts about the post-election disunity and how it might have been avoided.) On a global level, if some cultures are more individualistic or communal, will ICTs differently affect their digital democracy efforts?