Dissertation Research/Initial Literature Review

The public sphere and civil society
One moment when this new power began to be collectively understood by grassroots activists was on April 23, 2003. It was 4:31 pm (EST) in cyberspace when Mathew Gross, then toiling in obscurity on Howard Dean's presidential campaign, posted the following missive on the message board of SmirkingChimp.com, a little-known but heavily trafficked forum for anti-Bush sentiment:

''So I wander back to my desk and there really IS a note on my chair from Joe Trippi, the Campaign Manager for Howard Dean. The note says: ''

''Matt, Start an "Ask the Dean Campaign" thread over at the Smirking Chimp. --Joe ''


 * Micah Sifry, The Nation

Changes in how people can communicate have always had a profound effect on political life and on society more generally. Jurgen Habermas developed an understanding of life in 17th century England as held together by face to face contact in teahouses. Benedict Anderson revealed the centrality of the printing press and the book to the development of the state. James Carey chronicled the impact of the telegraph and how it separated communication from physical transportation once and for all, profoundly changing American life. It is in the shadow of these analyses that I want to consider the interplay of society and social media technologies that enable any one person to publish instantaneously and repeatedly to all other connected others. I will begin by considering the analyses of communications, the capacity of individuals, and democracy by John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. Following this I consider Habermas and literature that has applied his concept of the public sphere to the internet. Subsequently I discuss other issues that that shed light on the question including the changing role of media, the possibilities for collective action and how movements have emerged around a digital commons.

Walter Lippmann argued in Public Opinion, written in 1922 that human behavior is a response to a pseudo-environment that stimulates action. He used the term pseudo-environment to describe a complex environment too complex for “direct acquaintance” but one that can be manipulated. For him, the public is for the most part a phantom and conceptions of a common interest fully understood by all and acting on issues is generally absent. The only savior for such society is an organization of experts to bring clarity and information into the public eye as even newspapers can only respond to public opinion, not challenge or change it. In The Phantom Public written in 1925 he goes further and perhaps as a result of his experience with the effectiveness of propaganda in World War I, he argued that the public has only one role, namely, to check the power of the state at infrequent moments. Regarding the substance of problems the public can do no more than “meddle ignorantly or tyrannically.”

In The Public and its Problems, Dewey, often presented as a counterpoint to Lippmann, made the case that the public that he defined as existing when people have “modes of associated behavior [that] may have extensive and enduring consequences which involve others beyond those directly engaged in them,” was temporarily in eclipse in the 1920’s. In his words “the democratic public is still largely inchoate and unorganized.” He saw the situation at that point as reflecting the transition of democratic institutions built for a pioneer society having been overwhelmed by machine and economic forces of the day and not yet shaped to take advantage of the new possibilities. Dewey saw every possibility that the public could come to the fore as the links between people, though intangible, are common, strong, and subtle and concluded “that communication can alone create a great community.”

Continuing to use the tradition of using the two authors as counterpoints, I note that Lippmann clearly frames the challenge well, whilst Dewey points, in my opinion, towards an understanding of a society where individuals have roughly adequate communicative capacities to operate as a true public. Lippmann predicted the development of late 20th century politics dominated by not so much by independent expert institutions as he hypothesized but competing expert institutions in the form of think tanks and policy generation organizations that existed in the age of television politics where the mass was motivated to vote one way or the other, sometimes forcefully changing the tilt of politics for a period. Conversely, Dewey hinted at, though refused to define, the forms of politics that will occur when the conditions to sustain a great community with a “scattered, mobile, yet manifold public may recognize itself.” He did, though, suggest characteristics of such a society when individuals have the ability to share in directing the activities of groups according to their capacities. For the groups it means that their members must be able to meet their individual potential. Seemingly insightfully, from the perspective of today (as I will argue later) Dewey also mentioned that it will be necessary for these groups to interact flexibly and that this will privilege the members of groups that do so, as the interactions reinforce each group. Wistfully though ultimately pessimistically, Dewey suggested that a true democracy of “free and enriching communion” is unlikely since it will require “free social inquiry .... indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.” Writing in 1927 such pessimism was perhaps warranted.

Taking the above as a starting point and considering the public, one could say that the public, as much as it came was Lippmannesque in character in the 20th century and functioned only as an occasional check on power in the commodified public sphere that Habermas argues replaced the real public sphere in the industrial age. The results weren't pretty; bad actors used the ability to communicate with a mass public in pursuit of narrow aims sometimes at great human cost – could Hitler have come to power or the Rwandan genocide occurred without the radio – but the affordances of today suggest that a world more nearly along the lines of Dewey's aspirations is now possible.

More recently the term “public sphere,” first defined by Jurgen Habermas, in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, has taken on a revered status in academic discussions of societal deliberation since the publication of the book in English in 1989. The term, which Habermas uses to describe a narrowly defined element of bourgeois 17th and 18th century society that he argues emerged in England during that period, has become a yardstick against which to measure the health of contemporary civil society. Additionally, the term “civil society” which Habermas also uses widely in his writings, is of somewhat older origin, having come into use in the 16th century as a description of community. However, it has re-appeared more recently, most notably around the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it was used to describe both the groundswell of people agitating for change, as well as a set of institutions that needed to be developed following the regime changes in order to sustain new political bargains. That said, these writers who don’t concern themselves with a net-enabled public or civil society they would have had trouble imagining and don’t provide much illumination of 21st century society.

Social Capital
Very obviously, the computer-facilitated 21st century society is more complex than that of Habermas’s limited bourgeois public sphere of the 17tthand 18th century, which he documents as being cultivated in English coffee houses and pubs of England, where discussion of areas of common concern occurred, and which was sustained through the medium of a small press and the literary salon. More recent debates about the public sphere, civil society, and the engagement of individuals in it have been framed by Robert Putnam’s comprehensive analysis of civic engagement in the United States, Bowling Alone, in which he identifies a decline caused by, among other factors, a generational shift away from associational activities at a local level and the impact of television as a time sink. Additionally, Theda Skocpol, though acknowledging the decay of local civic organizations, explains that the change in local civic institutions has been as more a factor of modern political realities than anything else and the need to lobby in DC to advance political interests. Thus any consideration of civil society in the United States to take into account this decline in civic engagement and role of the internet in this transformation and the behaviors it permits must be considered in the shadow of this literature too.

The affordances of the internet
The idea of the internet, or more colloquially the net, a term that refers to multifarious aspects of working with networked computers, came into use in 1974 when the term “internetworking” was used to describe a small number of computers that built upon a network of computers operated by the US military, ARPANET. , Nowadays “the net” is often used interchangeably with the term “the web,” the common abbreviation for World-Wide Web, the name given to a specific subset of functionality on the internet that was only conceived of in 1992 and defined in 1993 by Tim Berners-Lee. Today the term internet can refer to any one of a multitude of resources and electronic interfaces that support interaction with the widest range of writings, voice and video resources, as well as pages that act as entry points to organizations, web enabled processes and possibilities to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously. A range of services, though taken for granted by many, could have developed along a very different trajectory had different decisions been taken. Critically, this mix of infrastructure enables anyone with at least rudimentary written and computer literacy to communicate privately or publicly at almost zero incremental cost (once access costs have been paid). It also hosts in a distributed manner discussion groups, websites and peer-to-peer networks of computers. Importantly, this combination permits many types of distributed sub-networks to form that utilize the open standards for connecting to the internet to publish even the most insignificant thoughts and ideas. This infrastructure, rapidly built and innovated upon, suggests that it must be serving some purpose and thus might have some impact on society and politics.

Lincoln Dahlberg has attempted to evaluate the whether the internet more fully meets the criteria for an ideal public sphere by considering six conditions for a viable public sphere – autonomy from state and economic power, critique of criticizable moral-practical validity claims, reflexivity, ideal role-taking, sincerity, and discursive equality and inclusion, he takes from Habermas. The first, autonomy from state and economic power, he suggests isn’t fully met since state censorship is present, surveillance always possible, and commercialization of the internet ever greater. Despite this, he acknowledges the existence of non-commercial spaces that have clearly played a role in civil society. Perhaps most positively for the internet Dahlberg concludes that there is a tendency for computer mediated communication to meet his third Habermasian requirement, that rational-critical debate be accompanied by claims backed up by data. Here he sees the ever present hyperlink, so often supplying a reference, as supporting his claim.

Dahlberg concludes that reflexivity, another requirement of the public sphere, though possible, tends not to be met, as online exchanges tend to the pithy retort rather than the considered exchange. The studies of Usenet discussions he quotes are good examples of the shortcomings, and his critique of individuals and the limited way in which they generally fail to take ‘ideal roles’ in such discussions reinforces this point. That said, considering Usenet discussions as representative of online discourse is akin to drawing conclusions regarding political dialogue by studying football chants in the physical space.

Sincerity, or the lack of it, and the use of pseudonymity further complicate the virtual sphere’s capacity to mirror the Habermasian ideal. However, the positive benefit of such anonymity provides for the possibility that such spaces explicitly permit bracketing of identity and enable inclusion in ways that physical spaces do not. However, Dahlberg concludes this often isn’t the case with offline behavior leaching into cyberspace partly as a result of off-line inequalities carrying over.

To understand the possibilities that the modern web provides, it is not enough to consider how the world compares with an idealized public sphere but also consider the rapidly changing technological landscape for the population at large. The cost and availability of communications technology have changed significantly in the last 9 years. The revolution in telecommunications that had brought telephone access to an estimated 1.4 billion people by 2003 is estimated to have reached 3.3 billion of the 6.6 billion of the population in the world by 2007. Access to the internet has grown similarly. In the year 2000 approximately 400 million people had access, and in 2003 this figure had grown to approximately 800 million; it is estimated at somewhere between 1.0 and 1.2 billion in November 2007. What these numbers make obvious is that as cell phones become capable of accessing the web and performing many of the tasks of the computer, the number of people who can access the internet will almost double to a number far larger than the 1.6 billion people with a television set.

Another major change that is little discussed in the academic literature is the dramatic change in a bandwidth that previously limited the number of messages that could be sent and received from remote locations. Crucially, it is for all intents and purposes in a web enabled world unlimited, and as Keane writes, we are entering an era of communicative abundance where the limits on communication are artificial. Nonetheless, the impact of this infinite bandwidth is unclear since the problem of communication, as Keane writes, is transformed from one of scarcity to one of filtering. Moreover, the unscrubbable historical record potentially reduces the private sphere, as much more is recorded for eternity and able to be recalled in milliseconds to inform actions of others in the present.

It is this possibility, two-way communications on a scale so vast that it hasn’t been possible to conceive of before, that makes me consider whether Dewey’s great community might not come into existence much more so than in the past. The possibility is also the basis of much of the utopian literature written about the internet and its impact on civil society and the public sphere. John Perry Barlow captured this in 1996 in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, where he describes the internet as an entirely separate space where “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” Howard Rheingold has popularized the primarily favorable possibilities the web brings in his writings. Rheingold wrote The Virtual Community: Homesteading the Electronic Frontier (1983) at least partially in response to his first hand experience as a member of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL), one of the earliest communities of its kind, participating in primitive online fantasy worlds of the Multi User Dungeons (MUD), and using internet relay chat (IRC), the latter a tool that today has been displaced for the most part by instant messaging (IM). Crucially Rheingold concludes that “users themselves, given sufficient tools and freedom, will create their own culture.” Moreover, he shares anecdotal case studies of libertarian-type online agitators and reviews the possibility that these spaces may be a diversion from democracy in the physical world, especially as they exist within infrastructure owned by the private sector where free speech is not protected in the same way.

Rheingold’s later book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution(2002) attempts to provide a parallel account of the impact of technology that he was seeing adopted in the year 2000 – for example, the mobile smart phone and the always-on geo-sensitive web service. His hypothesis is that processes of association and assembly might change significantly when everyone is able to know who is in their vicinity and as online events are woven into the day-to-day texture of a person’s physical world. He sees the banding together of people into ‘smart mobs,’ as happened in the overthrow of President Estrada in the Philippines, as representing an early example of what is possible when acts of association are mediated by these technologies. Nonetheless, he tempers this utopianism with the corollary that this world also contains a loss of privacy and the possibility of cooperation for pernicious goals. Similarly, Cass Sunstein, in Republic.com (2002), describes the fears of people who feel the internet will be bad for democracy, when he describes a world where everyone can read the ‘Daily Me,’ a self-edited electronic news sheet that reduces common experiences and permits people to live within one-person echo chambers.

However, when authors as esteemed as Cass Sunstein explicitly reject the hypothetical, that the internet is bad for democracy, with which he has become associated, it does suggest that we are still on very new ground when it comes to talking about the internet and the public sphere. Nevertheless, it is still useful to examine this literature in detail as it provides pointers for further research and as these tendencies towards fantastical literature are likely to impact how technology will be received. (This literature shares a commonality with literature from earlier periods concerning technological innovation, where new technologies are imbued with mythic properties and only after a cultural lag does society catch up with a more measured understanding of their impact. )

These impacts have also been studied on a small scale. Blacksburg Electronic Village is one such example of an experiment conducted in the 1990’s to give everyone in a small town access to the internet. The experiment was built upon what would now be considered primitive digital architecture. As David Silver recounts, what was created was far from the Habermasian ideal. Moderation, or what some might call censorship, limited discussion; the most popular usage of the electronic new board was used to locate information regarding the movie theatre schedule; and flame wars were common. Warren Sack attempts to go further in his studies of a large number of Usenet discussions, creating conversation maps that provide an alternative to the analysis performed by Anthony Wilhelm in his book Democracy in the Digital Age, where Wilhelm concludes pessimistically that Usenet discussions were not very deliberative after analyzing only a small number of message interactions.

More recent literature has tended to present the internet and its impact on democracy in a more sophisticated light. Peter Muhlenberger posits that the internet is unlikely ever to have any substantive impact on the public sphere. He argues this partially because, using his argument of the human as an agent, citizens will be unable to participate if only for lack of time or attention, given the vastness of the information available on the internet, but also because of the habits of the internet user who cares more for its instrumental value for work and education. Moreover, general lack of interest in using the internet for critical rational debate may be at the root of an apparently un-invigorated public sphere, a lack of interest that can possibly be understood as a result of a lack of acquisition of moral reasoning abilities.

In contrast, Scammell, in a short piece addressing the citizen-consumer, argues that the internet, in the form of a number of successful anti-corporate campaigns, is a powerful tool and may yet transform politics in ways that we have not yet seen.

Peter Dahlgren provides a more complex analysis and has considered the internet in terms of its structure, representational impact, and effects on citizen interactions. With regard to its structure, he suggests it should be analyzed from the standpoint of legal, economic, social, cultural, and technical perspectives. The representational aspect he regards as important as it is a study of how the output of the media the internet creates is structured. The third aspect Dahlgren considers, interaction, is concerned with the how the participants interact with the content and with each other within the online structures. He then takes this analytical model and considers it in the light of empirical literature, concluding that the internet offers some possibilities for civic interaction but is no quick fix for democracy. Moreover, he suggests that given the commercialization of the internet, which is increasingly significant, prospects for a full scale revitalization of the public sphere are remote. Partially, he argues, this is so because the internet can be used by governments to control their populaces. He also, realistically in my view, suggests that the desired outcome isn’t a single public sphere but rather multi-sector online spaces. In this he finds a greater possibility, as these spaces can facilitate a greater communicative heterogeneity though such an atomization may also increase the risk of a lack of a connection between both the online and offline spheres and those institutional structures at the centers of decision-making.

Somewhat more optimistically, Coleman, a person who has worked extensively on e-democracy initiatives in the UK, who holds the assumption that political and civic engagement are increased when the citizen feels connected to the political process, explores the possibilities that digital information and communication technologies provide. His argument rests on the idea that the citizen is more than a bundle of interests but also is a person affected by how governance is executed and that technology can support engagement. He argues that technology can reduce distance, create at least the illusion of mutuality in any connection, and aid the elected representative in providing some coherence in representing many people, as well as providing a space where empathy can be expressed. It is the connection made in this way that he sees as increasing civic engagement.

Implicit in the writings of Coleman and Dahlgren is the transition of the internet from being only a medium of transmission to a place where you are “online,” with its own culture. Perhaps it is a result of familiarity or of the seemingly unlimited bandwidth, or some other factor, but the idea of the internet as “an alternate place,” with architecture, where one is present (with presence signified through indicators embedded in instant messaging programs), seems to yield the most significant possibilities for research. Though the summary of writings above shows that the possibilities of such spaces initially came to prominence in the more breathless accounts, most presciently and notably in the descriptive accounts of Howard Rheingold, it is clear that the transformation in communicability that the world is experiencing recently has begun to provide possibilities that may permit a Deweyan public, or multiple micro-Deweyan publics, to emerge and enhance civic and democratic engagement across the globe.

The future is not merely a technologically determined – whereby the adoption of a technology is assumed to lead to a particular outcome – but a much richer question. Technology is clearly the major enabler of change, but it permits many possibilities. Nor is the question one of understanding a change to a single dominant new media structure, since changes will likely take many forms as personal motivations drive media in contrast to the search for profit that animated all too similar media institutions of the past. Neither is it a question of understanding solely how individuals will interact with technology or understanding how institutions will be transformed. The challenge is to synthesize an understanding of all four. Doing so will likely answer whether a mobile-internet enabled public sphere provides for richer communicative possibilities.

Dahlgren’s analysis of civic culture that sees the citizen as agent more or less empowered as a result of a number of cultural factors (values, affinity, knowledge, identity, and democratic practices) seems an especially promising lens through which to consider how civil society will change. Moreover, it may be possible to extend his idea of a citizen’s culture to include technology and the affordances it provides to citizens, as well as the organizational culture in which the citizens find themselves, as a way to further understand factors that affect engagement in politics and the public sphere.

There are already emerging dynamics, such as the existence of online advocacy groups, the proliferation of blogs, and deliberative spaces where sophisticated debate appears to occur. Yet, it is clear that such digital architectures involve only an activist minority, are imperfectly integrated with physical institutions, and are, for the most part, the online equivalent of a room where everyone speaks at the same pitch and with a similar volume, simultaneously. Understanding whether (or more likely how) these changes will affect the offline and online information architecture of civil society and the public sphere writ large is an important question that needs to be addressed. An important next step towards understanding the interplay of social media and political life is an understanding of changes in technology permit movements to have their own media.

Media for everyone
The ability to publish has always been understood as important. Malcolm X once said that the “The media's the most powerful entity on earth.” Leon Trotsky’s account of the Russian revolution, Michael Schwartz’s account of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, and Todd Gitlin’s account of the new left movements in the 1970’s give mass media a similarly important role.

Leon Trotsky, in considering the role of mass media at a time when it required significant amounts of labor, capital and equipment to successfully communicate the Russian revolution to just a whole city, mentions media several times in his account. The first is a discussion of the value the typographical workers’ union provided to the military revolutionary committee as a result of their reports about the “printed agitation of the counter-revolution.” The media also figures a few pages later in his account when he records the contrasting messages presented to the population of Petrograd by the dueling compromisist bourgeois and proletarian presses. Importantly, the messages presented by the presses differed, apparently scaring the bourgeoisie into staying at home and encouraging the proletariat to meet and participate in what would now be called political rallies, which perhaps provided the critical confidence to participants and resulted in their decision to stand with the revolutionary forces later in that turbulent week. Moreover, as the revolution came to a head, Stalin is recorded as spending his time at the editorial office of the party’s central organ. Even later in his account Trotsky recounted the task given to Commissar Uralov to lead the Semenov Guard Regiment and occupy the printing plant of Russiskia Volia for the purposes of printing in large format in high circulation the Bolshevik paper.

Michael Schwartz’s account of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance and its challenge to the cotton tenancy system portrays an organization attempting to create a channel of communication with its supporters and those sympathetic to its cause. Unfortunately for all the efforts, few of the approximately one thousand papers existing in 1890 that made up this channel survived more than a year. Despite innovations combining communications to farmer supporters with more broadly relevant articles, the dearth of merchants prepared to advertise in the so-called radical journals made editors reliant on subscriptions, which were rarely enough to cover costs. Clearly the media environment of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance differed from that of 1917 Petrograd, but the challenge was the same. Success required the ability to use media external to the Farmers’ Alliance, and without it the Alliance was hobbled in its efforts.

In Gitlin’s account of the rise and fall of the New Left movements of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, media is accorded a similarly important role. Gitlin goes as far as to state, “[P]olitical movements feel called upon to rely on large-scale communications in order to matter.” In some sense this is making explicit what is implicit in Trotsky’s account of the Russian revolution: Media matters. The complexity in the 1970’s was that the state didn’t nearly as directly control the means of media production, nor was it economic for a movement to even attempt to generate national mass market media such as the Southern Farmers’ Alliance had attempted to do. Moreover, Gitlin makes a persuasive case that because the New Left movement couldn’t communicate except through the national mass media, they had to conform to its strictures and pay the price when the media interpreted events counter to SDS’s intended message. SDS’s failure was thus pre-ordained by media, which highlighted its failings as quickly as it is trained its readers’ eyes on the events SDS staged. Crucially, the interplay of the movements’ structural weaknesses in the spotlight, which SDS was were ill-equipped organizationally to address, only further focused attention on organizers whose skills were found to be inadequate, and even when the actions of the organizers made good copy, the organization wasn’t able to respond pro-actively or successfully.

The only alternative to the reliance on the mass media that existed was the internal media of the movement, which existed, but on a small scale. As Gitlin writes, “its own communications were scanty and improvised.” Initially only a biweekly task list, sent to key people, existed, complemented by a monthly bulletin. A weekly newsletter arose nine months after the anti-war protests of April 1965. Seen in this light, it is perhaps less surprising that the movement was defined by the “centralized commercial culture” of the mass media.

Social media and performativity
Nowadays, the idea that any organization would not have its own media seems preposterous. An initial premise of any movement today is that from inception it can communicate directly with as many people as are interested at almost zero marginal cost. Messages can be sent to supporters multiple times a day through a variety of channels on the internet. Movements can communicate publicly to millions from a central organ as easily as from the smallest organizing unit to scores of people. In fact, it is impossible to stop small sub-groups from self organizing using online media tools independent of any central hierarchy.

Alongside this availability of the mass media through the internet has occurred a reduction in the reach of individual mass outlets such as television shows and print newspapers. No longer will a story in a single newspaper reach a broad swath of the population such as was realistic in Petrograd in 1917 nor will evening television news reports reach perhaps 30% of the population as it did in the 1960’s in the Walter Cronkite era. Major publishers can still set the tone to some extent, prioritize and de-prioritize news (as occurred in the reporting of the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003), and through their credibility and research provide critical information, but they are no longer nearly as influential as they were. Importantly, this emergence of a media environment where counter-narratives can survive as a result of the increase in the number of media outlets provides the possibility of coverage sympathetic to a social movement. Additionally, the de-concentration of audience and the lowering of the costs of media distribution have meant that niche broadcasting has become more common and advertisers have become more prepared to advertise in such channels. This has set up a feedback loop that supports the further de-concentration of media audiences as advertisers opt to pay only to advertise only to eyeballs that might purchase their product and thus outlets further specialize, thus advertisers focus more narrowly etc. etc. Notably this is countering the increasing concentration of outlet ownership.)

Equally important is that media can no longer operate solely according to a self-regulating news cycle. In the past if an event wasn’t covered the day it happened then the likelihood of it being covered subsequently was lower. Of late, the ability of specialist outlets to quietly generate interest in an event that, at the time, was considered of low importance can now lead to news stories popping above the fold days later as a result of burgeoning interest unrelated to its being newly breaking news. The best recent example of this occurring is the sustained coverage of the Ron Paul presidential election campaign well after it had been declared a failure. Such off-cycle news reporting is important as it can momentum where in the old news environment a movement would have withered after being starved of the oxygen of coverage it needs to prove its viability.

Moreover, the new media capable of performing the function of mass media also function just as well for one-to-one communication. Phone calls are no longer the province of the few bourgeoisie or government officials as in Petrograd in 1917. Nowadays they are complemented by cell phones, email, and SMS owned by all demographics in society. All these personal communication devices are at least as important as message communication devices as the mass media are, and for an insurgent movement they are far more responsive. Whereas Trotsky mentions the takeover of the telephone exchange as a final step in the execution of the revolution, today’s movements have far more sophisticated mechanisms available to them before they even start organizing.

The ability of media internal to a movement to sustain coherent action is of a fundamentally different nature today. Whilst in the past the cost of mimeographing or photocopying placed both a financial, temporal, and geographical constraint on building coherence in social movements, electronic media does not. Media today has an instantaneousness and multi-lingual reach that could not have been envisaged more than 20 years ago. This was exemplified in the early 1990’s by Mexican Zapatistas who to great effect used the internet to generate sustained mainstream media coverage for the activities of a few rebels in a remote part of Mexico that would normally obtain little coverage in foreign media. A more recent example is the Electronic Intifada (http://electronicintifada.net/), which describes itself as a “pioneering online resource for media analysis, criticism, and activism” on issues related to Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, providing coverage of the conflict from a Palestinian perspective. On a global scale, Avaaz (http://www.Avaaz.org) models itself as “a new global web movement with a simple democratic mission,” yet is almost solely a media message machine based on mass-email technology that reaches 3.2 million people using 13 different languages. The ability of movements to take advantage of technology changes the nature of organizing as demonstrated by the protagonists of the above examples who have succeeded in recruiting people to their cause and sustaining their engagement. The pace of growth can be faster, and no longer are movements constrained by a lack of advertisers, as the Southern Farmers’ Alliance was.

Moreover, pace changes everything – free rider problems are reduced as the cost of participation falls if movements are short term. Journals not relying on advertising neither have to temper their editorial, nor are they sustained after the activist energy dissipates – unpaid volunteers move on, redundant journals die. This has the curious dual impact of taking away distractions of otherwise still present but irrelevant journals, and the viable focusing journals on serving the needs of the activists uncaring of the needs of no longer necessary advertisers. Moreover, the actors in a movement such as http://Avaaz.org couldn’t conceive of the organization without the net extending as far as it does (Avaaz only has a rationale if a public on a supranational scale exists.) In the case of Avaaz the net performs the movement just as the Black and Scholes options pricing model performed the financial futures markets of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and FICA to the securitization of US mortgages in the first decade of the 21st century.

However, though new media undoubtedly permits easier organizing, the effect on balance for the success of insurgent or revolutionary or conversely status quo movements is entirely unclear. Social movements in favor of change can emerge more easily, but so can movements in defense of the status quo. Furthermore, it is possible that internal coherence building media will result in a larger number of more narrowly focused yet geographically dispersed groups rather than the emergence of the large scale movement that have emerged in prior periods of history. This latter effect could happen as people interested in narrowly defined issue groups, which previously would not have been able to reach critical mass to be self-sustaining within a geographic location, can exist, since recruiting within a limited geography is no longer a constraint. Moreover, though such coherence is possible at any scale, it is likely to result not in a single large movement but rather an affiliated, networked, federated, or heterarchical set of movements. Regarding the likely absence of oligopolistic media channels, I will suggest that fewer movements will be completely silenced, and politics will be less seen as movement against incumbent government but rather movement against movement, the prize being the balance of governance on a temporary basis.

That media capability impacts politics, the public, and society is not a particularly novel point to make. Benedict Anderson in his oft cited book, Imagined Communities, suggested similarly that without moveable type, Martin Luther’s theses pinned against a chapel door in 1517,and subsequently rapidly reproduced by printers could not have been seen nearly so quickly. Without the printer, the subsequent century of war that engulfed much of Europe might have been very different, as it would not have been possible to sustain the religious propaganda that underpinned the rationale for the fighting. What is different today is that incumbent powers do not have the same opportunity as François I of France who responded to critics by banning the printing of all books on pain of death.

Even though historical analogies are frequently stretched too far, one has to wonder whether the current media environment doesn’t have more in common with the period of pamphleteering in early American history than with recent decades, except this time the pamphlets are electronic and globally accessible through cyberspace. Social movements now have a cost-free and unmediated communications channel open to them that has never existed before. Perhaps Malcolm X’s exhortation to be aware of the power of the media can be read in a new way, as everyone can now become a broadcaster, and as a result, movement type organizations can now be sustained in situations never thought possible in prior periods. However, there have been other objections raised regarding the efficacy of such organizations in the past. Key among these challenges has been the argument that participants would rather free-ride than contribute.

Models of collective action
Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action attempted to explain two things: Why it is that social movements occur, and given that they don’t often arise, why they don’t form. Olson suggested that social movements would rarely be the solution to a problem. Today this logic is being challenged from a new angle by authors such as Yochai Benkler and Clay Shirky. Though Benkler, Shirky, and their followers are considered far outside of the traditional social movements canon, their thinking usefully provides a new counterpoint to Olson’s logic and suggests a rationale for new possibilities regarding the opportunities for social movements. In this section I interrogate Olson’s logic in light of Benkler’s and Shirky’s recent scholarship, and argue, using a small number of thumbnail cases, that the arguments of Benkler, Shirky, and Olson can all hold. Moreover, the communications context of today suggests that social movements are more often going to become the preferred solutions to shared political or societal problems or issues than in the past.

Olson makes a simple argument. In its most abbreviated form, it can be summarized as the free rider problem. As movements get larger, the incentives for individuals to not act in such a way as to generate a collective good or shared benefit become greater and greater. Even though in some specific cases this logic fails to hold, as seemly irrational solidaristic behavior occurs on occasion, he makes the case that if you think of rational behavior as being narrowly understood as whatever is in the economic or welfare interest of a single individual, it is relatively easy to argue that social movements will be rare occurrences, as indeed they seem to be. Citizens for the most part tend to find and agree on vehicles to solve problems that can be addressed only by collective action through means other than social movements. Where the problems require a straightforward economic sacrifice, methods of government and taxation have acquired legitimacy. Where questions of efficiency have taken priority, firms have emerged and markets have beaten out alternative solutions.

The easiest critique of Olson is to simply broaden the conception of self-interest and thus explain away the social movements that have emerged as coming into existence at moments when, for whatever curious reason, people have suddenly defined their self-interest more broadly than in the past. Though this argument is relatively easy to make, it is inadequate, because it doesn’t explain why these events have occurred at some times in history and not at others. Moreover, as a ‘black box’ explanation (i.e., no attempt is made to explain why it occurred), it leaves aside the reasons why people have suddenly defined their rationality more broadly at a particular moment. An alternate critique would be to say that people just don’t act as narrowly rational beings (in the Olsonian sense); they cooperate and form solidarity with others when they can to better the conditions of others. In this light, Olson’s argument is irrelevant.

However, I prefer to accept the principles behind Olson’s argument. I’m someone who takes the shortest path on the subway to class. I don’t do unnecessary work. I like to use the easiest method I can to solve problems. I am broadly a rational person. Yet I do ally myself with others at times in pursuit of shared gains for society. However, I don’t participate in every social movement with which I have an affinity, nor do I spend all my available time pursuing the objectives of social movements for a benefit that will accrue only to the movement as a collective benefit. In that way, I can be considered a microcosm of an Olsonian society, a society where only at certain times and in certain geographically bounded spaces and cultural moments have social movements emerged. The Kibbutz movement in Israel is one, and the working class Chartists of 19th century England, who campaigned for a wider electoral franchise, are another. I’ve picked these examples as they are movements that didn’t die or decline because they succeeded. The commonality to them is that they all came to be seen as less relevant as time went by. That said, society ultimately implemented solutions to the issues they identified. In England years after the Chartists declined, the universal franchise was granted through the efforts of middle class parliamentarians. In the case of the Kibbutzim, though only a small number are still in existence, the state-building role that they once fulfilled is now carried out by official bodies. In both cases the solutions to the problems were via methods other than social movements. To understand these cases further, I turn to two Yochai Benkler and Clay Shirky.

Both Benkler and Shirky have made arguments that could suggest that social movements will be more likely to occur in today’s internet-connected age. Benkler doesn’t talk in the syntax of social movement canon, but his argument holds in this context. His argument is, like Olson’s, very straightforward, and the implications similarly profound. The argument he makes is that because the internet permits networks of people to form more easily, without respect to participants being in synchronous time, similar cultural contexts, or even the same physical geography, there is an opportunity for such loosely connected groups to be productive. Benkler explores this argument in an economic context and calls this phenomenon “peer production,” suggesting it provides a new method of social productivity. His rationale is that this method of production can occur when the size of the contribution is small, the project is modular, and collaboration cost is low. Moreover, participants can participate in more such efforts more often without undertaking any significant investment. Benkler calls these groups networks, whilst he could as easily call them social movements. Evaluating the phenomenon in the social movement context suggests that (a) viable movements (those with an adequate breadth of skills, knowledge, and capacity) can form around interests more easily today, as the base from which they can recruit is unconstrained by geography as it was in the past, and (b) an existing movement now likely has more labor available to it than in the past, assuming that one can integrate the results of the work and reward the diverse motivations of the providers. In a way Benkler sidesteps Olson’s critique, suggesting that motivations can be many when the pool of members of the movement is large, since in any large number of people, disparate motivations can intersect to generate co-supportive behavior.

Shirky, who is interested in social movements, adds to Benkler’s argument by suggesting that Robert Axelrod’s research into game theory further supports the likelihood that social movements can succeed. Shirky comes to this conclusion by arguing that we should consider social movements as repeated games where each potential future activity (or game) casts a shadow of the future over any current game. This assumption is critical, as Axelrod has found that where there is a possibility of a subsequent game, the most successful strategy is “tit for tat,” a strategy that begins with an offer to cooperate and plays each subsequent game by playing the strategy the person’s opponent played previously. In this strategy, it is rational to act in someone else’s interest even if there is a cost to me in the here and now, on the basis that I will benefit from a reciprocal action at some point in the future. Combining this argument with Olson’s argument that people are narrowly rational, and Benkler’s argument that networks can form and through “peer production” provide resources to a social movement, suggests that some light can be shed on the “black box” I mentioned in my critique of Olson’s argument. Perhaps we can see the internet – by supporting additional communications, more frequent social contacts, and deepening of relationships that might have previously fallen away -- as having a parallel with previous historical epochs when social movements occurred more frequently. Whereas in those prior periods it required a complex and rare confluence of circumstances in order to generate social movements, it is possible that now the internet means that we should assume the set of necessary conditions is met more frequently than before. We should expect social movement behavior to occur more readily. (Moreover, since new media is a central animating aspect of these new movements. Nowadays, it takes a conscious effort to opt out of movements presented as facebook invitations – your record of disinterest as clear a record for all to see (in eternity?) as any positive action. Quite possibly, lending your support to a movement is less costly than opting out. This fact quite possibly turns Olsen’s thesis on its head.)

Examples of social movements facilitated and sustained by the internet today can most purely be seen in online communities such as Wikipedia, a social movement that exists around the creation of a common body of shared knowledge. Calling Wikipedia a social movement perhaps at first might seem odd. It is known for what it produces: copyright-free general knowledge on a diverse set of subjects. That said, it can’t be explained as a firm profiting from knowledge, since it does not seek to make a profit for shareholders. Calling it a knowledge market seems incongruous, since it isn’t an online space where people trade one piece of knowledge for another. Neither is it a Weberian bureaucracy where a tight hierarchy exists; there are more than 8.9 million registered ids since it started (with approximately 162,000 active in the last 30 days) and only 1,500 administrators, most of whom have only marginally more authority than the average user. This perhaps isn’t a traditional social movement, as it isn’t directly counter-posed to a government, nor is it composed of people who are necessarily disenfranchised from political processes, though stepping back from the content itself it becomes very clear that Wikipedia can be seen as a movement sustaining an alternative to commercially produced content and thus operating in opposition to corporate interests. Moreover, it has characteristics much more in common with a social movement than with anything else, as it is indirectly a set of people cooperating without financial incentives and generating through their combined efforts a huge volume of copyright-free information consisting, in the English version, of more than 2.8 million short encyclopedic articles. What is more is that these articles are really the product of discussion on more than 11 million supplementary pages that identify the authors and the positions they constructed in the process of producing the article. (Perhaps Wikipedia:User and Wikipedia:Talk pages in Wikipedia are the 21st century equivalent of organizing meeting minutes?)

In the context of US domestic politics, the campaigners who volunteered for Barack Obama, much like the core of enthusiastic supporters surrounding Howard Dean in ’04, can hardly be considered political actors in the same way as the smaller number of insiders who propelled President Clinton’s campaign to success in 1992 or even the insurgent campaign of Jimmy Carter in 1975 were. It further begs belief that the mobilization of possible more than 400,000 volunteers on election day in 2008 for get-out-the-vote activities can be considered political operatives acting within a traditional political organization. It is far easier to see them as a social movement appended to a political campaign. Moreover, though the peak get-out-the-vote effort only operated for 72 hours, the hundreds of thousands of volunteers were managed through the clever combination of self-organizing volunteer labor, and a small number of paid organizers using information provided through the affordances provided of modern technology. Again whilst this is not a traditional social movement it is of a scale and structure such that it is best described as one.

On a smaller scale is Andrew Slack’s project. Slack, an avid Harry Potter fan with the performance presence of a 24-year-old aspiring stand-up comic, has formed the Harry Potter Alliance, a loosely affiliated set of 11,871 friends on MySpace and a sophisticated sister website, that aims to bring “together Harry Potter fans from everywhere to spread love and fight the Dark Arts in the real world,” specifically around the issues of genocide, poverty, AIDS, and torture. This diverse collection of people has had a disproportionate impact on Wal-Mart, an organization that the Harry Potter Alliance has chosen to challenge. Slack and friends cleverly created a mockumentary “Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart,” and then released it via their Wizard band friends (Harry and the Potters, Draco and The Malfoys, et al.) in order to generate buzz. And buzz they generated, gaining 1,599,000 views of their video and undoubtedly raising the awareness around the impact of Wal-Mart stores on a diverse set of communities. Now, views of a video hardly a movement make, but it hasn’t stopped there. Those involved gathered in May 2008 in Potosi, Missouri, at Wrockstock 2008, for their second gathering, a mixture of wizard inspired rock and films from which funds are raised to support activism on issues important to the group. This hardly looks like a government-overthrowing social movement, but it is an example of what can be achieved using modest resources when communications technology is deployed within a community that is highly computer-literate, as teenagers in the United States generally are, and as such it suggests possibilities in the future for other movements.

Now, none of the above are stories of heroic, under-privileged groups successfully challenging entrenched elites alone, but then these tools have only recently become available, and like all resources, they are disproportionately acquired by more privileged groups first. However, these cases still suggest possibilities for fast development and more frequent use of social movements as solutions to societal issues both on a national and international scale.

The model I see for social movements going forward is based on the protests in Seattle in 1999 against the WTO, since these protests were perhaps the first case that leveraged the connectivity that Benkler describes, and a case in which can be seen the results of peer production. In Seattle, a large number of diverse groups congregated, and though they had varied, sometimes conflicting, motivations, they found a short-term confluence of purpose in disrupting the official conference. They conformed to Olsonian principles, since they were small, narrowly focused groups that could be said to be acting in line with their rational self-interest, yet they were able to coordinate efforts through communication platforms, such as email and the cell phone, only recently adopted. Levi and Murphy have written that the cooperation between the anti-trade campaigners, the pro-development campaigners, violent anarchist groups, and others in their choice to collaborate occurred perhaps as they saw it as building credibility with other campaigns in the shadow of potential future events.

I have suggested above that certain contexts can be rationally understood to provide a more supportive environment for social movements than others, and argued that right now the availability of the internet means that this is the case for those connected online. However, all of this optimism for the possibilities of movements must be taken with a pinch of salt. Activists in social movements, which network economics literature might identify as nodes, don’t have unlimited capacity. Just because you can form a network doesn’t mean poor people’s networks will arise; the poor don’t have any more surplus labor capacity than they had in the past. They will just be able to use whatever capacity more efficiently, and thus dedicate perhaps a little more time to it, as they see a marginally greater benefit than in the past. Furthermore, that solidarity so essential to tipping the equation in favor of action rather than inaction will not always arise; the internet doesn’t make it a certainty.

Moreover, limits on the size of viable groups will continue to exist, as Olson argues. However, if we think of these movements not in terms of traditional organizations with interests but as a peer production network, perhaps Dunbar’s number should be seen as the limit of any unit within a movement rather than solely Olsonian logic. This number is said to be the largest number of people with whom the average individual can maintain regular and effective social relationships. The rationale for the importance of this number is that sincere social connections need to exist throughout any social movement. Thus, even the largest social movements of millions are really best understood as multiples of groups of 150 people interconnected in some (or multiple) ways.

Additionally, the technology results in the sustaining of relationships over time that previously would have decayed and been unavailable in the past. The result is that networks can form not only between people who are part of someone’s current network or group but also can encompass collaborators from earlier life experiences.

I believe that the argument laid out above adhering to the raw logic of Olson, who cannot be faulted for providing an argument that correctly explains the absence of constant and continuous social movements, better explains why they do occur. Moreover, as I have argued using Benkler’s and Shirky’s ideas it suggests that democratic, authoritarian, market movements, and firms will more than likely face more challenges, more frequently from social movements than they have in the recent past, as a result of the ability of groups to more easily identify shared affinities -- at least, that is, whilst the cost of open connectivity to a communications backbone exists.

3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers exist, totaling 45% of the world’s population; most acquired cell phones within the last 3 years. What they will do with these cell phones is unclear, but it begs credulity to believe that such connectivity won’t be used at least in part to pursue shared objectives, just as small groups of people have done in the past in geographically limited spaces, synchronously, and within single cultural contexts. It is not that we’ll see a sudden change either operating in a shared and collaborative manner, or that Olsonian principles will suddenly fail to be observed. It is just that the utilization of such technical affordances facilitating communications will occur more frequently, even if irregularly and only occasionally at first. Nonetheless, this communicative moment may just be a tiny blip in the history of societal organization unless such social movements come to be seen to have greater efficacy as societal solutions for decision-making and policy-setting than in the past.

In short, the interplay of the internet and social movements may have considerable impact on societal structure, stability, and governance processes and institutions just as it is having on markets and firms that trade in information-based products. As the newspaper, music, and film industries are being shaken up, we have every reason to believe that contentious politics, as Tilly might have called them, will change too.

Underpinning this thinking is that the resultant voluntaristic commons-centric (since they come together over a digital space) organizations will likely resemble what have previously been known as social movements, but will overcome the weaknesses that have existed therein. They also resemble models of cooperation with which many of us would be familiar from village or apartment block life. Somehow they will need to solve the challenges of large scale coordination. Such problems were only previously attempted in the field of large-scale engineering projects, through operational research optimization tools, like those created in the NASA space programs, that are so obviously unsuited to voluntaristic approaches, they are not worthy of adaptation. To understand these challenges in more detail I will appeal to some insights from studies of the commons.

The Commons
The term the commons came into frequent usage after Garrett Hardin’s article The Tragedy of the Commons was published in Science in 1968, arguing for a need to consider the unequal split of costs and benefits that exist when a person is able to consume resources without consideration of the limited nature of the total availability of that resource. The argument is often invoked to suggest that commons like resources such as land or the sea will always be over grazed or over fished and ultimately become unproductive. However, the commons approach has been deployed and found some success in the economic sphere where significant parts of the production of software code is now done in favor of a commons sustained by the invention of the General Product License (GPL) or similar copyleft legal artifacts that induce and protect the fruits of donated labor from subsequent enclosure. Often what it boils down to is the argument that commons based anarchism produces inherently superior functional goods when the marginal cost of production of each new unit equals zero.

The argument rests on the efficacy and efficiency of the free software movement in a net enabled society. The evidence for such productivity has occurred following the adoption of the General Product License (GPL) and other variations of open source licenses across the movement. (Evidence is ever more plentiful - Samba, Mediawiki, Apache, Firefox - the list goes on.) Recently it has reached the point where few are now willing to defend the "closed" proprietary model as advantageous (see Shawn Shell for an article) Microsoft does so yet even they have opened a open source lab which seemingly seeks to benefit from external contributions of resources though doesn't license them in a "free" manner. Moreover, it is generally accepted that the success of free and open source software proves that it is of a comparable quality and reliability as that of proprietary software.

These functional advantages are underpinned by the fact that if the code doesn't quite work as needed the technologists have the ability to fix it themselves, and no less importantly, technology executives avoid the game playing inherent in selection and subsequent purchasing process for software licenses. Moreover free software users can be confident that they won't be left managing proprietary tools for which support is either suddenly no longer available or 30% more expensive as a result of an arbitrary commercial decision. Without question, the facts on the ground suggest that free software production works and a GPL induced commons is why it works. At the micro level production occurs through loose organizational structures, which David Stark might call heterarchical, which contain some level of order and modularity. Additionally, it coexists with profit seeking firms seemingly fruitfully for both parties.

Undoubtedly the internet society, a state of societal operation that is underpinned by an electronic network, is a necessary condition for the viability of peer produced, zero marginal cost digital goods, yet the success of such a mode of production requires a richer definition. (For me the seeming anarchy in the mode of production inherent in the development of free code is perhaps more a result of a lack of understanding of the properties of such assemblages of people than anything else.) However, explaining that this mode of production can occur doesn't explain why it does occur when it does.

Stark and Neff in their article "Permanently Beta" identify the properties of the digital as privileging a mode of production that is forever unfinished, yet also one that is populated by "a hodgepodge of formal and informal organization[s]" alongside "practicing communities." Eli Noam, in his article "The Economics of User Generated Content and Peer-to-Peer: The Commons as the Enabler of Commerce," specifically identifies a narrow context at the beginning of an innovation cycle where he argues community production of content has a competitive advantage over other forms using strictly micro-economic arguments. What Noam doesn't accept is that the innovation life-cycle may, if one accepts Stark and Neff's arguments, never include a phase that privileges either the competitive marker, or even the oligopolistic or monopolistic firm. There may never come a point where enclosing what has been produced inside a private entity occurs. (Perhaps some products in the future will always be of the people, by the people, for the people?)

Explaining why open source production does occur and is currently so successful requires a recognition that artifacts such the GPL have been central to its success, that it has arisen in a context in which it has aided (and been aided by) profit-seeking firms aiming to use its products in order to make a profit on other non-zero marginal cost goods. Identifying all these artifacts, the particular properties of the network, as well as the types of actors within networks which succeed is a task only just begun.

Chris Kelty has taken the argument a step further in his book Two Bits, which recounts the development of the open source movement and in so doing characterizes the movement as a recursive public - a public that exists independent of outside sources of authority that cares and as much for what it produces as how it produces it. From the other side of the argument Michael Heller has looked at how division of ownership creates a tragedy of the anti-commons and creates sclerosis. I mention this as it allows one to think of the commons ideas, as Heller does, as existing along a continuum rather than as a binary choice of commons or ownership.

Others have probed questions of trust and reputation as a way of understanding how such structures can survive. Moreover the context in which I am interested, a modern context where information is no longer scarce and suddenly attention is, suggests that we should probe the development of political movements and policy change with the idea that there might be a new sort of politics at play. Perhaps this type of politics privileges the community? Possibly this will reveal vectors along which the world might change in the future.