Jennifer Earl University of California, Santa Barbara
The rapid expansion of the Internet has major social implications that present long-term questions for scholars across disciplines, including researchers interested in activism and social movements. This CAREER project focuses on the important relationship between the Internet and social movements by examining under what conditions activism and social movements may be affected by Internet use and what mechanisms may lead to such effects. Specifically, this project examines two sets of hypotheses about Internet activism. First, the Internet is changing the way in which people participate in activism. In some cases, the Internet allows for online support of offline protests, such as online publicity or logistics coordination, but in other cases it is now possible for individuals to participate in protest actions while they are online, as is the case of online petitions and denial of service actions, among other activities. This project examines hypotheses claiming that: (1) opportunities to participate online in protest actions will increase over time and that these opportunities will become more automated; (2) illegal protest tactics will move online more slowly than legal protest tactics; (3) offline protests that use online coordination and logistics tools will be more affected by the use of wireless Internet technologies than wired Internet technologies; and (4) groups offering online and offline protest actions will offer similar kinds of actions online and offline, such as by offering letter-writing campaigns both offline and online. Second, the project is also concerned with whether traditional organizers, such as formal social movement organizations, will be as pivotal to organizing online opportunities to participate in protest as they have been historically to organizing offline protest events. Specific hypotheses claim that: (1) the lower up-front costs of organizing protest actions online will allow new kinds of organizers to enter social movements; (2) the lower up-front costs of organizing protest actions will also allow organizers to target broader ranges of entities more cost-effectively, making protest against non-governmental targets more likely over time; (3) social movement organizations established prior to the pervasive use of the Internet will be more likely to rely on for-profit technological contractors for creating and maintaining online opportunities to participate in protest; and (4) social movement organizations established prior to the pervasive use of the Internet will be less likely to engage in illegal online protest activities than other kinds of organizers.
Data on online protest-related activities will be collected using an innovative method for generating quasi-random samples of websites. Specifically, the project will collect two longitudinal data sets (one cross-sectional time series and one panel dataset) and four specialized datasets that focus on the hypotheses above. Statistical analyses, including multinomial logistic regressions and time series analyses, will be employed to examine the project's hypotheses in light of collected data. Together, analyses of these hypotheses will allow a more nuanced theory of the relationship between Internet and activism to be developed. The project will also lead to major advances in understanding how protest tactics, the form of participation in such tactics, and the production and coordination of those tactics is affected by wired and wireless Internet use.
Broader impacts of the project include: (1) extensive mentoring of underrepresented graduate and undergraduate students in research methods, advanced quantitative methods, and computer programs and programming (including both paid and unpaid research opportunities); and (2) policy implications disseminated to non-academic audiences interested in the changing shape of activism and social movements, whether online and offline.
This project examined the development of Internet activism across 20 issue areas for five years. Issue areas included standard social movement topics such as the women’s movement and the peace movement. Other issue areas focused on issues that have seen large changes in protest attention over the last several decades (e.g., immigration). Finally, other issues were chosen because they represent areas of contention that are more likely to be salient online, such as the digital rights movement. For each issue, the study collected data on multiple sides of the issue; e.g., abortion politics included websites that were pro-life and websites that were pro-choice. In each case, populations of websites on each issue were created, random samples were drawn from these populations, and then sampled websites were archived and content coded. One can imagine content coding is similar to filling out a survey about something the coder just read. Using results from the content coding, it is possible to make generalizable statements about the population of websites in each issue area and across all 20 issue areas. The project used the sampling technique to produce two different kinds of longitudinal data on websites associated with these 20 issue areas. In both cases, data was collected for five straight years. Using these datasets, this study was able to reach a number of novel findings about online protest. First, the study was able to demonstrate that types of Internet activism that scholars thought were rare, and therefore only studied occasionally, are actually very common and need more attention. Conversely, the study was able to demonstrate that one type of Internet activism—the use of online tools to support offline protests—was actually less common than had been thought. These findings points to a need to re-orient the types of cases that scholars study over time and the need to be much more careful in generalizing findings because different types of Internet activism tend to have different dynamics (see Earl et al. 2010 for more on this topic). Second, the study is also concerned with whether activist sites created by organizations versus those maintained by individuals or informal groups differ. Early findings suggest that some kinds of tactics are more likely on organizational websites than others (see Earl and Kimport 2010 for more on this topic). Interestingly, although research prior to this study showed that non-organizational websites were more likely to host or link to online protests such as online petitions, these data show that organizational websites have closed this gap and now lead in the provision of some online tactics. However, organizational websites are less likely to offer unscripted forms of engagement or to solicit information, feedback, or opinions from website visitors (Earl 2010b). Neither organizational nor non-organizational websites offer illegal tactics with any frequency—such tactics were exceeding rare; rather, illegal tactics tend to be organized through more ephemeral (and therefore harder to monitor and police) forums such as chat rooms. Analyses of these data is continuing, focusing on understanding how organizational sponsorship of different tactics has changed over time, what factors are driving those changes, and whether organizational websites target different kinds of actors for protest campaigns than non-organizational websites. Other findings from this project include an ongoing examination of how social movements raise the profile of specific issues for other movements (e.g., can the pro-choice movement raise the profile of health care reform for other movements, and if so, under what conditions?). An early approach to analyzing data for this question was laid out in 2010 (see Earl 2010a), but is being revised to take advantage of more complex analytic techniques. The study has also investigated the role of privacy in online protest, showing that online protest frequently occurs on private servers where there is no constitutional right to free speech (Earl 2012). Finally, the study has examined the role that social movement websites play in a larger political ecology in each issue. Specifically, Earl (2011) was able to show how different issue areas featured relatively co-equal activity on issues between social movement websites, organizational websites, news websites, non-profit websites, government websites, and commercial websites whereas other issue areas only included websites from subset of these groups. Ongoing analyses are being conducted to understand why different issue areas have different political ecologies online. Future analyses will include time-trend analyses of the availability of online tactics and the level of automation available in these tactics, as well as an examination of whether groups tend to deploy similar tactics online as offline (e.g., online petitions and offline petitions) or use different tactics online versus offline (e.g., online petitions versus offline rallies). Broader impacts of this project include substantial training for undergraduate and graduate students, particularly under-represented students, as well as policy implications for fostering democratic participation.
