CAREER: The Internet, Activism and Social Movements

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SES-0547990Jennifer EarlUniversity of California, Santa BarbaraThe 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.