Identity, technology, and narratives: Transnational activism and social networks

The changing organization of social activism in post-industrial societies has received considerable attention, from the study of “new” social movements (Buechler, 1995; Melucci, 1994), to exploring information networks in transnational advocacy (Keck and Sikkink, 1998), to the examination of self-organizing properties in technologyenabled permanent campaigns (Bennett, 2003). We are interested in how networking technologies operate in different social activism contexts. Social technologies do not offer magic solutions in the formation of activist networks, nor do they often replace organizations, meetings, or rallies as means of building solidarity. We begin with this point as a caution against thinking that persistent,large-scale activist networks, such as those associated with the recent surge of transnational activism, occur effortlessly online. Our interest is to determine where information technologies fit into the conventional gamut of protests, campaigns, and endless meetings that bring people into direct contact. At the same time, many forms of activism-particularly those that cross national and cultural boundariesblur easy distinctions between on-and offline behavior. The difficult question is to locate the connective elements that enable people to travel across interpersonal and digital pathways, and in the process, cross individual, organizational, and network levels of action. We suggest that the uses and flows of narratives in theorganization of political action illuminate the interplay between technology and human interaction, while providing links among different levels of analysis required for understanding protest organization. The junctures and disjunctions in thecomposition of networks can be thought of as choices at different levels (e.g., individual, organization, and network-wide) about what to identify with and how strongly. Stories often embody and calibrate those identifications at different levels of analysis. For example, if we focus on the organizational level in protest networks, identifying the uses of narrative quickly takes us to the nexus between individuals and organizations: what organizational stories enable which individuals to identify with them, leading them to form what kinds of relationships (e.g., from formal membership to loose affinity) with which organizations? The ways in which stories join or separate individuals and organizations may affect how network ties are established and how easy they are to sustain. Stories also may become elemental inthe flow or blockage of information across internet connections among individuals and organizations. Some degree of the linking in most contemporary protest networks is electronic-machines communicating with people and with other machines. Not only are costs of organization potentially reduced by digital linking, but various technology links may well become part of organizational structure themselves. Stories are relatively easy to embed, whether in whole or in part, in digital media, from action alerts in e-mail lists, to the mission statements and “get involved” pages of websites, to electronic forums that enable members to tell and share stories about their concerns. Pentland and Feldman (2007) suggest that technologies, alone, do not organize social networks apart from the stories that people share through and about thosetechnologies-including their reasons for, and their ways of using them. We propose to explore how technol-ogy and narrative organization play out in three different contexts in which activist relationships form and become expressed: protests, campaigns, and social forums. Each type of activity represents a different slice of activist life, and each arguably requires the others in order to create sustainable and effective movements. Protest events such as marches, vigils, and demonstrations draw dramatic attention to causes, and give activists opportunities to vent and publicly express emotional concerns. Campaigns target larger audiences with more detailed information about why they might want to join in protest against offending campaign targets. And forums provide opportunities for the activist community to reflect, learn, plan, and celebrate their causes. This analysis examines a case of each type of activity with an eye to how narratives travel over networks and either enable or inhibit the loose-tied relationships that social technologies can help establish. Our first case explores the “World SaysNo to War” protests on February 15th, 2003, when 15-20 million people took to the streets in opposition to the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. In what many regard as the largest coordinated mobilization in human history, activists and organizations working on a wide range of issues showed their support for a common political demand-“No War on Iraq,” a frame of such breadth that millions of individuals and organizations could raise their own narrative versions of the issue within it. That broad narrative freedom enabled many individuals to develop flexible relationships with sponsoring organizations, resulting in the broad use of digital media to activate diverse personal political networks (Bennett, Breunig, and Givens, 2008). Our second case, which may be generallydescribed as centered on a long-runningcampaign (surrounded by various protest events and forums), compares fair trade networks in the U.S. and the U.K. Those networks consist of individuals and various types of organizations seeking fair compensation for the producers of commodities such as coffee, tea, and cocoa in the global south. While both the U.S. and the U.K. campaign networks are transnational in character and dedicated to a common cause, the lead national “gatekeeping” organizations differ substantially in the stories they promote about how individuals, companies, and, ultimately, nations can best engage with fair trade. The national certification and labeling organization in the U.K. (the Fairtrade Foundation) emphasizes a layered narrative that encompasses both individual conscientious consumption and collective (including national and transnational policy) commitments to principles of social and economic justice in trading relationships. The relatively radical collective action story of global economic exploitation has been widely publicized through a national trade justice campaign in which the Fairtrade Foundation joins most other major fair trade groups to mobilize public action for fairer national and international trade policies. Thus, narratives about exploitation and justice sit comfortably alongside more personalized, less explicitly political narratives about reasons for responsible consumption, all of which are given room for expression in web forums, e-mail lists, and other media affordances such as events calendars. By contrast, the U.S. certification and labeling organization (Transfair USA) emphasized the individual “conscientious consumer” version of the fair trade narrative to the near exclusion of the trade justice story, creating tensions with many other actors in the U.S. network who would prefer elevating the justice story, which they see as part of a larger narrative whole. The relativenarrative harmony in the U.K. and the tensions in the U.S. are clearly reflected in the distances and clusters in the structure of web linkages in the two networks (Bennett et al., 2007). Our third case looks at the organizationand cancellation of the Northwest Social Forum (NWSF) in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada. Social forums have emerged as valuable tools in building cross-issue and transnational collaboration and solidarity by providing spaces for speakers, workshops, films, and social networking to explore issues, strategies, and social divisions. The organizers of the NWSF set explicit narrative goals to empower traditionally disempowered groups such as people of color and indigenous groups. However, the broadly shared narrative of an open participatory organizing process ultimately clashed (in the view of many participants) with an adopted planning committee process aimed at building personal relationships with disempowered groups. This process was accompanied by decisions to reject more technology-based, loose tie networking strategies for organizing and communicating with participants in the forum. The inability to create strong tie relationships in a short time led to the last minute cancellation of the event, followed by critical and often personally hostile narratives expressed on the list serve, and the collapse of the Forum process (Toft et al., 2007).

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