Time, technology and troublemakers: 'fast activism' and the alter-globalization movement in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"This study documents and critically evaluates the history of the alter-globalization movement in Canada. It makes a contribution to existing scholarship by providing the most comprehensive historical account available of the movement's major mobilizations during the past fifteen years. The study also deploys an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to examine the largely overlooked temporal dimensions of contemporary activism in the age of instant communication. While recent years have seen a proliferation of scholarship lauding the advantages of "new media activism," of which the alter-globalization movement in an example par excellence, most of this literature neglects what are arguably more pressing questions regarding the ways in which contemporary social actors conceptualize and organize time, and the implications of these hegemonic temporal norms for patterns of collective action. To redress this gap, this study evaluates the social, cultural and political implications for activism of the process of time-space compression, driven by the basic dynamics of capitalism and facilitated by digital communication technologies. Using evidence collected from semi-structured interviews, it therefore not only offers the first systematic and in-depth account of the history (and pre-history) of the Canadian alter-globalization movement, it also demonstrates that the social acceleration of time facilitated by new media technologies encourages a tendency toward "fast activism" by diminishing three activist time-related practices in particular: building sustained movement infrastructure, learning from the past, that is, collective memory, and thinking reflexively about the future, that is, long-term strategic planning. The study's conclusion offers some tentative suggestions for improving the political capacities and potentials of today's anti-status quo troublemakers."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".