Digitally Enabled Social Change

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the emergence of "Internet activism,"but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind frommore traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affectthe essential character or dynamics of online political protest? In Digitally Enabled Social Change,Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport examine key characteristics of Web activism and investigate theirimpacts on organizing and participation. Earl and Kimport argue that the Web offers two keyaffordances relevant to activism: sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participatingin protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together.A rally can be organized and demonstrators recruited entirely online, without the cost of printingand mailing; an activist can create an online petition in minutes and gather e-signatures from coastto coast using only her laptop. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, andletter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, Earl and Kimport show that the more these affordances areleveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest; the lessthese affordances are leveraged, the more superficial the changes. The rally organizers, forexample, can save money on communication and coordination, but the project of staging the rallyremains essentially the same. Tools that allow a single activist to create and circulate a petitionentirely online, however, enable more radical changes in the process. The transformative nature ofthese changes, Earl and Kimport suggest, demonstrate the need to revisit long-standing theoreticalassumptions about social movements.

Katrina Kimport is a Research Sociologist with ANSIRH, part of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.