UW research: Old fashioned protests give way to online political activism

The Boston Tea Party. Martin Luther King’s march. Vietnam Peace Rallies. Our own WTO and May Day protests. Street activism has played a role, sometimes a deciding one, in American politics.

But like the song says, “The times they are a-changin’.”

In the arena of political protest, are the days of “Hey, hey – Ho, ho,” giving way to a world of keyboard typing and mouse double clicking? A new University of Washington study took a look at the changing way we fight for change and found the best way forward.

UW’s Dr. Phillip Howard says demonstrators aren’t just taking it to the street – they’re making their point on the information super highway. “What’s interesting and new is that digital media, and particularly social media in the last couple of years, has made digital activism a real possibility for a lot of people.”

Digital activism is people advocating and agitating for political change using keyboards instead of protest signs.

Howard and his team have been tracking digital activism’s rise for over two years.

“We found that, more and more, there are cases of digital activism that are online only and they are very effective,” says Howard.

On the other hand, they found old-school street activist movements that didn’t go online, didn’t get very far.

Howard also found digital activism is strongest against government rather than corporate targets, and has decided advantages, like less chance the message will decay into mayhem.

In fact, “The link between (digital activism) and violence is simply not there,” he says.

Howard adds, that while the media focuses on destructive digital protests like hacking and destroying websites, the vast majority of online activism is constructive in tone and effect.

But there is a danger. The same amplification effect of social media that’s so good at rallying people makes it easier to deceive them.

“We did find an unfortunate number of campaigns that looked, on the face of it, to be citizen campaigns,” Howard says, “but after a little poking around it turns out they were what we call ‘astro-turf,’ in that they weren’t grassroots movements but movements that were started by corporate interests or lobbyists, that don’t really have a lot of citizens behind them. They’re not real movements but often it’s hard to tell the two apart.”

So where does the future lie? Is digital activism making the traditional kind obsolete? Howard says no.

“But contemporary activism has to have a digital strategy to be effective,” says Howard. “You need to get people out into the streets, but to do that you need a Twitter campaign, Facebook, texting and cell phones to get your message out there and to coordinate a non-violent civil disobedience campaign. You need both these days.”

It seems that the fusion of the two is what will make the difference when it comes to making a difference in the 21st century.

I guess that means we’ll still have to suffer through endless iterations of that old chestnut chant “Hey, hey – ho, ho, (your target name here) has got to go!”