SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Social Movements through the Net

1) Internetworking: The Internet has enabled the wide spread expansion of established movements. We would like to distinguish three types of internetworking: organization and network coordination, grass roots global internetworking, and direct action coordination.

2) Capital and information flows: We would distinguish three main types of net based economic activity, the sue of:  mainstream networked channels of capital distribution, solicitation, and management by social movements; computer mediated barter banks and local capital pools and credit unions and collective goods coordinated via the net, and decentralized media distribution networks.

3. A) Alternative media and theory:

Alternative media: We note three types of alternative media on the net: alternative media, grass roots global media and information networks and counter-surveillance measures. On alternative media including variously, online alternatives to mainstream media, social movement media, and local media online.

B) Alternative theory networks: Theory and strategizing is another level of the culture of resistance conducting online. While theory is mostly engaged offline, as in the big AGM mobilizations at counter-summits, strategizing which creates new practices/theory in larger networks is often/usually conducted via the Internet.

4) Direct cyber activism: Another type of cyber activism is the use of the Internet as a primary ground for political action.

(a) Virtual sit-ins: Movements are utilizing e-technologies as a disruptive tool to industry and civil practices or temporarily dismantle the various stages of capital's circuit e.g., the production and circulation of commodities. Cyber activists disrupt net activity through electronic civil disobedience, for instance, in “virtual sit-ins” by mounting extensive traffic to shut down websites.

(b) Hacking: In new forms of resistance, which have been called "hacking", hackers appropriate or disrupt technologies for personal and political ends. One example is a British hacker who cracked into hundreds of web sites worldwide and circulated anti-nuclear messages.

(c) Cyber terrorism: More forceful than such cyber-disruptions are the prospects of cyber terrorism. While computer viruses spread via the net have caused billions in economic losses and the escalation of such antics, often by youths using straight forward software, is of concern, hacker’s attacks for overt political purposes have been sporadic and small scale to date. Yet, government investments in cyber defense measures are increasing.

5) Contesting and constructing the Internet: Types of contestation of the nature of Internet and its relation to inequality and democracy include: movements to democratically inform the structure, ownership, and technical aspects of Internet media and technology, activism to create wider access to the internet, crossing the digital divide, and planning and development of the social use of the net. Structuring the Net, The nature of the net has been and is continually being worked out by think tanks, government agencies and legislation, civil institutions, industry, venture capitalists, net administrators, policy wonks, programmers, and in social movements. To understand the social fabric underlying the potential of cyber activism, it is important to explore how Internet technology itself may be designed to facilitate or inhibit democratic interaction.

6) Online alternative community formation:

With the Internet, early online forums demonstrated the promise of a great diversity of “virtual communities” organized around common interests (Rhiengold 1993). A fundamental problematic is if Internet-based communities exist solely as “virtual” moments in cyberspace or do constellations of digital information have an enduring material basis for “reality.”

BY MKULA DENNIS