“Smart-Mobbing The War” is all about communication technology and political collective action, but it fails to mention the book or author. I guess it’s a good sign that the term has turned into a verb so quickly.
(Thanks, Andee and Steve!)
All this electronic activity went largely unnoticed by the press. The nationwide antiwar rallies on Oct. 26 and Jan. 15 were dominated by far more radical groups, like International Answer, that had gotten out in front of the protest movement, turning out a core of of activists under the perennial anti-American slogans. But as fall turned to winter and the threat of war frayed nerves across the country, moveon.org formed a tactical alliance with the radical groups, with which it had nothing in common other than opposition to war in Iraq. ”We’ve changed the way that we do organizing in the last eight months,” Pariser told me. ”One of the things is to move past e-mailing and phone calls and get people back out on the street and use the Internet as a backbone for catalyzing that.”
The ”Virtual March on Washington” was a campaign that Pariser and moveon.org held on Feb. 26: more than 1 million Americans around the country, moveon.org reports, flooded the Washington offices of their elected officials with antiwar messages, timed by electronic coordination so that phone lines wouldn’t jam up. Internet democracy allows citizens to find one another directly, without phone trees or meetings of chapter organizations, and it amplifies their voices in the electronic storms or ‘’smart mobs” (masses summoned electronically) that it seems able to generate in a few hours. With cellphones and instant messaging, the time frame of protest might soon be the nanosecond.
Dot-org politics represents the latest manifestation of a recurrent American faith that there is something inherently good in the vox populi. Democracy is at its purest and best when the largest number of voices are heard, and every institution that comes between the people and their government — the press, the political pros, the fund-raisers — taints the process. ”If money is what it takes to get attention, we’ll do that,” Pariser says. ”But we’ll do it the grassroots way.”
Comments
@ 11:31
Here’s the letter I wrote to the editors:
To the editors –
I guess I’m pleased that “smart mob” has been verbed in a NYT Magazine headline. I do want to point out that although the anti-war movement has brought the use of online media and mobile communications to the foreground, smart mob tactics were used successfully in the Seattle anti-WTO protests in 1999, and in the “People Power II” demonstrations in the Philippines that brought down the Estrada presidency in 2000. More recently, Karl Rove, Bush’s political strategist, was reported to have coordinated the 2002 GOP electoral victories via Blackberry mobile e-mail and cell phone; young Korean activists who used text-messaging in a last-minute get-out-the-vote campaign are credited with tipping that election in favor of the eventual winner; and recent Kenyan elections were monitored and organized via mobile telephone and text messaging. An entire ecology of many-to-many media has matured over the past decade: more and more activists and grassroots movements use web pages, weblogs, email lists, mobile telephones, and text-messaging to organize collective action. I think we’re only at the beginning of the era in which entire populations use new media for political organizing, get out the vote campaigns, and (I predict) mass lobbying campaigns in which volleys of text-messages prompt constituents to call their Congressional representatives on the eve of specific votes.
Howard Rheingold (author of “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution)
@ 15:16
Good for you Howard. I thought the same when I saw that article.
Speaking of mobs, I wonder if such technology was used by Republican heavies during the FL recounts, which resulted in poll workers being intimidated away from doing their job. Apparently a video on this is making the indie documentary rounds:
http://www.unprecedented.org/
@ 12:52
With regards to democracy, “mobs” raise a concern about the deliberativeness of citizen-action. In other words, are campaigns that use new communication technologies for spin and activation good for democracy?
Shamless plug: I run a web site that links online deliberation with political action called e-thepeople.org. Although we envy the scale of a moveon.org, we are quite happy with the qualitative levels of intelligence, civility and diversity on our site. (And we do have 200,000 visitors a month too.)
@ 14:48
Deliberation is all-important, Michael, and I’m glad you are working on it. Can you briefly describe your efforts, and their effects?