Session 1, Table A - Political Activism on the Internet

Why'd you come to this table and what 2 questions would you like to discuss?

Jennifer Brundridge: Studies effect of internet on political participation, which is limited. Internet has not so much changed who is participating in politics, but how. The structure is a fruitful line of study. Individual effects are harder to find - contribution of internet to exposure to political difference. Measuring tolerance, environment... Structure and participation. Market for activism. How has the structure of activism been changed and why that matters and what that means for democracy?

Jennifer Earl: Studies internet activism and social movements. Different visions of internet activism - terms are very different in common use between individual actors. How our understandings of how activism works may or may not change across those different ways that activism is found on the internet. Less significant effects of the technology when protests are facilitated online but take place offline. The real process looks different and the major effect is when most of the action and participation happens online (strategic vote trading, for example). News content online - providing information versus mobilizing people. Coding itself has been very difficult - what is defined as news? Blurred lines. How are activist sites serving up information?

Hannah-Beth Jackson: Application of the question. Speak Out California, established so that progressive perspective information could be distributed. Activate progressives to be better educated and respond. Online petitions and letters. Publish a voter guide. Expand social networking. How to be more effective?

Katy Pearce: Political parallelism in former Soviet states.

Bruce Caron: lightblueline.org - mashups, blogging the data, the idea to build a new newspaper is interesting and what political activism looks like in that - are their guidelines/models for a newspaper 2.0 in terms of trust? With activism you don't have to build trust - but maybe in newspaper 2.0 this will be different? Tell a story that readers understand.

Ralph Thomas: Not sure what newspaper 2.0 meant. A political junkie. Increasingly concerned about loss of certain basic precepts (Locke) are being eroded and being destroyed and we're back in Locke's world. Major religious groups are prepared to fight and finds it frightening. Internet as medium. Left/Right is different. Interested in how the internet puts out information.

DISCUSSION:

Difference between 1.0 and 2.0 is that dis-involvement in politics is no longer required?

Writers are news makers as well as documenters of the news.

MSM is corrupted by advertising and political parties.

New online political elite? Political commentary is more common. (From Pew) Research has shown that in fact numbers are surprising.

Politics used to be successful because people were interested in it. Today it is different. In Europe people like to talk about politics. Why isn't it discussed here?

Digital Learning (MacArthur) - outside of school learning. Web campaigning - Kristin Foote, one of the things that is most appealing of Web 2.0 is the unmanaged character of the content they produce - produce the content themselves and comment. McCain result - more "genuine" interaction in Web 2.0. How do you engage them in a way that is authentic and real to them.

There is a huge stretch of interest.

What makes people compelled to put their anger online? Two questions: post your own, join a pre-existing.

Companies do actually respond to petitions. Kids are getting experience of participating and getting listened to. This is a big deal - cultural petitions, for example, are building skills!

Social networking, example of Facebook and MySpace. Why grow a new social network when good ones already exist?

18-24 year old voting - big effort last election and it worked. That suggests that there are ways to reach people with information.

1. Go to the places where people already are. 2. Be careful once you go there - esp. re: business. Internet as public good.