Organizing in the Internet Age 

How online activism can help us understand how real change is
made.

YES! Magazine
By Mark Engler
November 2, 2010 

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/organizing-in-the-internet-age

The Internet is no substitute for person-to-person
organizing. But it is a tool that can be used by activists.
And it is potentially a rather powerful tool.

This is the not-so-novel conclusion I presented recently when
writing about 'The Limits of Internet Organizing.' The piece
was a follow-up on a much-discussed article by Malcolm
Gladwell in the New Yorker. I was generally sympathetic to
Gladwell, but many others haven't been. His article has
sparked widespread conversation and criticism in many corners
of the Internet.

Based on the discussions I've had with people on this topic,
I think we need to clarify some terms. For those who believe
that social movements are the bedrock of social change, it is
important to come to some agreement about what 'organizing'
is.

When I am talking about organizing, I am referring to
activity that mobilizes collective action around an issue
with the goal of building popular power-the power of social
movements and democratic constituencies, as opposed to that
of established elites or moneyed interests. Ideally, as the
word implies, organizing leaves behind some level of social
movement organization.

I am not trying to reinvent the wheel here or make up some
new, official definition. A basic tenet of understanding
social movements is to distinguish the work of organizing
from that of, say, social service. The two are different
things. Likewise, there are lots of other pursuits that might
count as 'activism'-broadly understood as actions which
engage a person in issues of public significance-that don't
fit into a narrower understanding of 'organizing.'

Aaron Schutz offers a more in-depth discussion of what
organizing is and isn't in his 'Core Dilemmas of Community
Organizing' series at OpenLeft. Schutz operates within a
pretty strict Alinskyite framework, so there are some
movement-building activities that he does not count as
'community organizing' that I would include within the scope
of what I am addressing. But he makes some good general
distinctions.

In short: giving out food at a soup kitchen is not
organizing. Filing a lawsuit against a racist slumlord or an
exploitative corporation is not organizing. Making
environmentally conscious lifestyle choices is not
organizing. Running for office is not organizing. And
education or raising public awareness, in and of itself, is
not organizing. These things might broadly be considered
'activism,' but by themselves they do not produce social
movements.

That is not to say that any of these are bad things. In some
cases, they can be vital. Nor am I trying to be holier than
thou on this point. As a writer, I would certainly not call
myself an organizer. I hope that my work can be helpful to
social movements and to those who are doing the rubber-meets-
the-road work of building them, but my writing by itself is
not doing that. Again, if you believe that such movements are
the essential ingredient for progressive social change, it is
important to make the distinction.

So how does the Internet fit into all this?

There's obviously a lot of online activity (Facebook status
updates, online petitions) that does not qualify as social
movement organizing. To the extent that people believe these
things are sufficient to produce social change, I think they
are quite problematic. To the extent that people harness
these activities in pursuit of actual organizing, I think
they can be much more helpful.

Consider three examples that illustrate a range of online
endeavors-and that show widely varying potentials.

First, there is the story in Gladwell's article of how one
person used Internet networking to retrieve a lost phone:

    The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky's
    Here Comes Everybody. Shirky, who teaches at New York
    University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power
    of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan,
    who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after
    she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the
    back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone
    company transferred the data on Ivanna's lost phone to a
    new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the
    Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens,
    who was using it to take photographs of herself and her
    friends.

    When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the
    phone back, she replied that his 'white ass' didn't
    deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page
    with her picture and a description of what had happened.
    He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded
    it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of
    Sasha's boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto
    the site. Someone found her address online and took a
    video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video
    on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter
    Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created
    a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories,
    but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and
    Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the
    report under 'lost,' rather than 'stolen,' which
    essentially closed the case. 'By this point millions of
    readers were watching,' Shirky writes, 'and dozens of
    mainstream news outlets had covered the story.' Bowing to
    the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as
    'stolen.' Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend's
    Sidekick back.

While there are some interesting aspects to this type of
networking, Gladwell correctly notes that examples along
these lines-'things like helping Wall Streeters get phones
back from teen-age girls'-do not represent social movement
organizing that challenges status quo power relations.

A second, more promising, example: when I asked readers for
their favorite online activist campaigns, several people
mentioned to me the 'It Gets Better' project. As many know,
this project was launched recently by well-known writer and
sex columnist Dan Savage as a response to the publicized rash
of suicides among bullied gay youths. In the wake of one
suicide, Savage wrote:

    I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes.
    I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I
    wish I could have told him that, however bad things were,
    however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

    But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids.
    Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to
    teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have
    homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent
    their gay children from growing up to be gay-or from ever
    coming out-by depriving them of information, resources,
    and positive role models.

    Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids?
    We have the ability to talk directly to them right now.
    We don't have to wait for permission to let them know
    that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

Savage established a YouTube channel for the 'It Gets Better'
project and put up his own video message of hope. He
encouraged others to submit. The result has been a remarkable
video series in which adults reach out to queer teenagers who
might otherwise feel targeted, vulnerable, and utterly
without support.

I think the project is fantastic and that it effectively uses
the Internet's strengths. Is it organizing? No. It falls more
into the category of outreach and education. But other
people, inspired by the site, have launched the 'Make It
Better' project, designed to take things a step further and
facilitate organizing around the issue.

A third example comes from Ted Nace, director of the
CoalSwarm Web site. The CoalSwarm site documents and supports
efforts around the country to close coal-fired power plants,
which are leading sources of CO2 emissions. Nace has
persuasively argued, in his book Climate Hope among other
places, that Internet listserves and Web sites have done an
important service in allowing organizations fighting specific
plants to coordinate their efforts with others, gain
resources and strategic insights, and overcome a sense of
isolation in their work. Nace recently wrote me:

    I worked in the anti-coal movement before the Internet.
    People in one part of the country had very little idea
    what was one going on in other places. Appalachian
    Voices' project with Google Earth did a lot to show
    mountaintop removal to the world. Social media allowed
    decentralized anti-coal activists to connect across the
    country. It has cut the previous isolation that limited
    local groups, and it's allowed much more information to
    get passed around than would ever have been possible
    'back in the day.'

The results of this Internet-aided organizing have been
significant. Nace states, 'By late 2009, following two years
of intense mobilization, opponents had derailed at least 109
proposed plants, bringing the coal boom to a sputtering
halt.'

At the same time that I find it exasperating to read a lot of
high-tech boosters-especially those with roots in marketing
and business management-spread hype about the world-
shattering implications of the Internet for social change, I
am genuinely excited to see savvy organizers get their hands
on new tools and new technologies and come up with innovative
campaigns. I look forward to profiling more of those in the
future.

As a last thought, I believe Jamie McClelland, one of the
tech whizzes over at the May First/PeopleLink collective,
makes an interesting suggestion when he argues that the
Internet is not merely a medium for activism, but that it is
important enough that it should simultaneously be a subject
for organizing. He supports shifting from the question of how
we 'should use the tools of the Internet' to a debate about
questions like 'what is our role in the development of
Internet?' and 'how do we support and develop the
revolutionary potential in the Internet' in the face of
efforts by corporations and governments to control and
monitor how we operate on this new digital terrain?

It is a fair concern, and I hope that-as much as high
technology-the tried and tested art of person-to-person
organizing will be brought to bear in addressing it. T

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License 

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus
and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over
the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached
via the website http://www.DemocracyUprising.com. This
article originally appeared on Dissent's Arguing the World
blog.

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