[Air-l] FC: How anti-Iraq war protesters employed technology, from NYT

[Gina Neff]

Not to be a crank, but there are some pretty big assumptions in this article. Are these groups free-wheeling and amorphous? This is contradicted by our data collected from protests organized by the same groups organizing peace rallies in the US. Can national and international protests mobilize effectively without working through organizations for logistics and mobilization? Again, contradicted by our data. Are protesters within the new social movements organizationally unaffiliated individuals who hear about the protest through the Internet? Again, contradicted.

I am not questioning whether the Internet is important or whether protest movements use it or not, but I am questioning the newness of the functions fulfilled by the internet. Yes, the current peace movement may have organized more quickly than those in the past, but that is partly due to a political situation that is very different from Vietnam and other wars (and Gitlin, quoted in the article, knows that. Besides, [snide comment ahead] Gitlin is one the very last people I'd trust with a comment on the current peace movement -- Has he even been to a peace march since Vietnam?).  

National days of action are not new. Local protests held in conjunction with larger, national ones are not new. Coordination in "non-hierarchical, heterarchical" coalitions is not new. (on this point, Leslie Kauffman has written a great history of the Mayday Tribe and the heterarchical organization of the May 1971 actions to shut down DC, which led to the largest mass arrest in US history. )

I'm with Steve: we need to think clearly about how the characteristics of the internet may make the medium something else other than just faster/broader than what's come before. And there's still a lot of research that needs to be done on how the technology is actually being used.

Gina 
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