activism for activism: the necessary locality of tactical knowledge

yesterday, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb interviewed Mary Joyce about the founding of her new meta-activism project. the idea is, in short, that most activist strategies were based on social and technological (technosocial?) conditions before the advent of mass digital communication. however, these strategies must be radically altered to enable what's being called digital activism. the focus of the meta-activism project, then, is to provide potential digital activists with the knowledge, tools, and tactics necessary to make full use of these novel technologies.

this seems like a rather sensible goal, depending on how it's accomplished. yes, it makes sense that tools for digital activism require new strategies and tactics; to some extent, this is the "more is different" argument about digital/social media. however, it seems that such tactics would also need to be grounded in local contexts. the same digital activism tactics that work with incredible efficacy in, say, Iran may fail entirely in Egypt, or the US, or anywhere else. I feel that a major portion of this project should be focused on situating digital activism in local cultural, political, social, and historical contexts, and on understanding how those contexts interrelated with the success or failure of given efforts.

speaking of success and failure, in the interview, Mary is pretty candid about how effective this digital activism has been, noting that "few cases of digital activism are actual successes." she goes further, noting the difficulty of even assessing success. is a campaign successful if it mobilizes a sufficient number of people (in which cases, what constitutes a sufficient number)? is it successful if it achieves its stated goal? by either criterion, few such campaigns succeed, and it's only a minute portion that achieve success in the latter terms of actually affecting change. this brings up a point I've wondered about often: why do some online social movements succeed, and why do some fail? there have been tons of studies of success stories, but I feel like these need to be complemented with studies of the failures, perhaps focusing on campaigns that succeeded in mobilizing large numbers of people but still failed to achieve their goals (if anyone knows of such work, feel free to point me in the right direction).

another point Mary made caught my attention. she described how, for a digital technology to be highly useful, it needs both scale and "use neutrality" (even she uses scare quotes around that phrase). by scale, she means simply that there must be a critical mass of users (again, what constitutes a "critical mass" is likely a topic for some debate). by "use neutral," she means that the technology "can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files." she cites YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter as use neutral, while she says LastFM and Bloglines are not.

I think I have to disagree with use neutrality, both on a terminological level and on a conceptual level. first, none of the tools she has described are use neutral; each is designed for a specific set of use cases. Twitter is not conducive to long, thoughtful, complex argumentation in a way that blogger would be. Facebook cannot host videos the way that YouTube can. however, I will admit that LastFM has a much more focused, constrained set of use cases than, say, Facebook. furthermore, these tools are anything but neutral. the ontological categories invoked by tools such as Facebook (friends, networks, feeds, etc.) privilege a certain type of configuration between the individual and society, and arguing that these tools have use neutrality distracts from the social, political, and cultural (not to mention philosophical and epistemological) commitments made in their design.

I think the point is not that these tools have "use neutrality," but rather "use plasticity." that is, while a tool such as Facebook or Twitter has a certain intended use, the tool is flexible enough, plastic enough, that it can be adapted to serve a variety of purposes in a variety of contexts. and again, we're back to what I think is the crux of the interesting issue here: how are these various tools repurposed and adapted to local contexts, and how do those processes of repurposing and adaptation change the tool (and, reflexively, the context) in ways that enable a digital activism campaign to succeed (or prevent it from succeeding)? synthesizing across different instances of the interplay between the plasticity of digital/social media seems like it could be a highly advantageous approach for enabling efforts such as the meta-activism project to make a real, significant contribution to understanding digital activism.

reporting and reportage

a couple weeks ago, NPR was running several reports on Karachi, Pakistan. it's part of their Urban Frontiers series looking at growing cities around the world. hearing the reports throughout the week gave the listener (or at least this listener) the interesting impression of gaining some understanding of urban Pakistani culture. various segments described demand for housing leading to illegal building projects, which then necessitated the bribing of government officials to get "protection" for such projects; or how inconsistent infrastructure meant that, for that same illegal housing, builders needed to throw hooks into powerlines and "steal" electricity; or how racial and ethnic violence nearly resulted in the death of an ambulance driver whose skin didn't seem to be quite the right color.

for a moment, I felt like this NPR reporter was doing a service to his listeners, allowing them to glimpse a culture beyond, and likely very different from, those with which they are familiar. however, upon further consideration, I came to the conclusion that the reports were doing almost as much of a disservice, not only to the listeners but to the Pakistanis on whom were being reported. the events and circumstances of Karachi were depicted not from the perspective of a citizen, but from the perspective of an American reporter. listeners were seeing the culture, but it didn't seem as if any attempt were being made to foster an understanding of the culture.

I couldn't help comparing these reports with ethnography, done both well and poorly (both being variously common in my field). an important aspect of ethnography is that the ethnographer presents a culture in its own terms, from the perspective of a member of the culture. the purpose is to portray the subjective, lived experience of what it is like to be a member of a culture. contrast this with portraying a culture from an external perspective, applying analytic categories and distinctions to a culture that might not exist in the culture itself. a classic example is that of studying Micronesian navigation. when trying to do so from a western navigational framework that posits a birds-eye view, the Islanders' techniques seem inadequate, at best, to get them from one island to the next. however, if one adopts an ego-centric (or boat-centric) view, rather than the more objective-seeming birds-eye view, the Micronesian navigation system not only makes sense but works strikingly well. this difference in perspectives is sometimes referred to as the etic/emic distinction, that is, viewing a culture on an observer's terms from an external (etic) perspective vs viewing the culture on its own terms from a member's (emic) perspective.

upon reflection, it seemed that the NPR reports on Karachi had an etic perspective that gave the appearance of an emic one. what does it mean to those people who are laying the hooks to be garnering electricity from the city's powerlines? is it stealing (a category that a western reporter might apply to such an activity) or do they conceptualize it differently (perhaps with a category of activity for which a western reporter might have no analog)? on the one hand, this choice of perspective isn't wholly bad; it's journalism, after all, not cultural anthropology. however, I worry that we (as a society) might grow to accept this type of reporting as providing a sufficient understanding of a culture, an understanding from our external perspective rather than from the culture's own internal perspective. I'm not arguing that ethnography is a veridical representation of reality; ethnography is a form of reportage, and inevitably in that process of reportage is the reporter. however, there is a certain sensibility in that reportage that I did not find in the aforementioned NPR series. just as Paul notes, a whole bunch of things have sprung up in HCI that attempt to follow ethnography's methods but not its methodology. I worry that something similar might be happening in this form of journalism, and I wonder what some of the implications might be in terms of understanding and appreciating cultures (both others' and our own).

autoethnovideography

at CSCL today, Ricki Goldman was talking about, among other things, the e-generation. this was the idea that through technologies like blogs, flicrk, YouTube, etc., everyone was becoming an ethnographer. my first reaction was, well, how is this different from previous mass media technologies? certainly, when the printing press was invented, people were able to write their culture in a way not previously possible. I think the technologies she's discussing, though, are not just a change of scale but a qualitative change, as well. a talk (my notes) I saw by Marc Davis echoed similar sentiments along these lines.

however, I also started wondering, perhaps everyone, at least in some sense, is really becoming an ethnographer. to some extent, aren't they writing their own culture? is YouTube effectively something like an autoethnovideography? (there's your neologism of the day, kids) furthermore, with people creating all of these digital cultural artifacts, how do the role and activities of the ethnographer change? meta was recently talking about photos and ethnography, and I wonder if the photos, video, and media a culture produces about itself might affect the way an ethnographer works. I suspect people who are more versed and practiced in ethnography would have more things (and more intelligent things) than I to say about the issue, so I'll stop for now at posing the question and leave the answering to others.

update (2007-07-24): I actually got a chance to chat with Ricki a bit about her thoughts on this topic, i.e., how do things like YouTube, flickr, MySpace, etc. change the roles and activities of the ethnographer? I didn’t take notes or anything, but I’ll try to paraphrase from memory. part of the discussion we had was about how, while people may be massively inscribing their culture in these various digital media, what their doing is not ethnography. while the primary task is writing culture, the ethnography is not, as many have noted, a veridical textual representation of that culture, but rather the culture as seen through the lens of the ethnographer. ethnography is not only a form of reportage, is it fundamentally interpretive (perhaps this ties back to my earlier thoughts on naturalists’ interpretation). generally when people make the sort of digital cultural artifacts that appear on YouTube or flickr, they may be inscribing aspects of their culture, but they are not doing an interpretation of that culture. I think this resonates with Rubikzube's comment below that when he posts photos of his vacation to flickr, he's not really doing ethnography; he's not engaged in a culturally interpretive act. Ricki said that she was interested in encouraging people to be more interpretive (perhaps reflective) in such activities, partially as another way of learning about their own culture and themselves.

she also talked about an interesting experience she had while doing video analysis of some classroom activity. one of the students said to her, “Ricki, you can’t see the classroom.” “what do you mean?” she asked. the student replied, “the teachers are different when you’re here. give me the camera and I’ll show you what the classroom is really like.” this isn’t just a matter of the presence of a researcher affecting the behavior of the teachers (and probably the students, for that matter). it’s a matter of perspective. ethnography is about capturing the emic perspective. what this student was arguing is that, when you give the camera to the members of the culture, that’s when you really get to see the emic perspective. this is what YouTube and flickr do, they capture the emic perspective from the emic perspective. I doubt this means that anthropologists and ethnographers of digital culture will be replaced by autoethnovideographers from within that culture (partly due to the interpretive nature of ethnography mentioned above), but I think it means that these media will become invaluable for ethnographic studies of that culture.