FCJManager
FCJMESH-007 Our Enduring Confusion About the Power of Digital Tools in Protest
Ivan Sigal and Ellery Biddle Global Voices doi: 10.15307/fcj.mesh.007.2015 Since 2005 Global Voices has supported thousands of writers, online media experts and translators to share stories across borders and languages. Many of these stories have covered digital activism and protest around the world. In this article Ivan Sigal and Ellery Biddel share what they’ve learnt about protests, tipping points and technologies by reflecting on these stories and on the contrary narratives about these events that mainstream media have tended to focus on. Did technology X spark revolution Y? Pundits and political leaders have pointed to or blamed social media for driving the uprisings in the Arab region and for many other mass protests around the world, including those in the Philippines and Korea at the beginning of the century, as well as more recent uprisings in Burma, Moldova and Iran. In each case, it is clear that social media platforms…
FCJMESH-006 From Information Activism to the Politics of Data
Maya Indira Ganesh and Stephanie Hankey Tactical Technology Collective doi:10.15307/fcj.mesh.006.2015 Tactical Tech has a decade of experience supporting the use of information and digital technologies to support rights activism. They say that in this time they have witnessed a radically altered information eco-system thanks to an explosion of new technologies, a dramatic rise in technology uptake and a burgeoning government and corporate surveillance system. Here Maya Ganesh and Stephanie Hankey, from Tactical Tech, discuss their analysis of the challenges this new information ecosystem poses for rights activism and they describe the ways in which Tactical Tech are choosing to address these challenges. As an organisation that supports activists and journalists to secure their communications to be more effective and more secure, we believe we have some parallels with groups working on a rather different issue: climate change. Environmentally friendly and sustainable lifestyle behaviours often start with having to recognise the…
FCJMESH-005 Technology and Citizen Witnessing: Navigating the Friction Between Dual Desires for Visibility and Obscurity
Sam Gregory WITNESS doi: 10.15307/fcj.mesh.005.2015 WITNESS has been training and supporting rights activists and citizen witnesses around the world to use video for over 20 years. Since this time they’ve trained people from 100 countries, supported successful advocacy campaigns and advocated for innovation in human rights technology. In this article, Program Director at WITNESS, Sam Gregory, discusses the events, reasons and philosophies that have informed their work and enabled them to support many people to use video and related technologies effectively, safely and ethically. Put yourself in the shoes of an activist: perhaps a long-term Human Rights Defender or a first-time citizen witness. You are filming on your cell phone in a repressive regime—capturing the testimony of someone assaulted by the police or documenting a protest. After recording your video you are faced with choices about how your video should be used. You can upload your footage to a popular…
FCJ-197 Entanglements with Media and Technologies in the Occupy Movement
Megan Boler OISE/University of Toronto Jennie Phillips OISE/University of Toronto [Abstract] Introduction: Fighting Fire with Fire: Entanglements between Corporate-Owned Platforms and Activist Social Media Practices The digital era has seen activists around the world use social media platforms and information and communication technologies (ICTs) for social movement organising. Activist uses of corporate-owned social media platforms (from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube) and digital tools (including smart phones and digital cameras) support unprecedented coordination of local and global movements. However, these hybrid (online and offline) social movements [1] produce frictions that reveal discrepancies between the risks and promises of corporate-owned networks. This is certainly the case with social movements concerned with economic inequality, such as the Occupy movement, where such uses can benefit the very corporations the movement seeks to dethrone. Regardless of how one measures the roles and successes of social media in the context of activism, the uses of…
FCJ-196 Let’s First Get Things Done! On Division of Labour and Techno-political Practices of Delegation in Times of Crisis
Miriyam Aouragh Westminster University Seda Gürses New York University Jara Rocha Bau School of Design Femke Snelting Constant Association for Art and Media [Abstract] Introduction This paper emerged from a workshop that formed part of the 2014 Thinking Together Symposium, held at the Osthang Architecture Summer School, Darmstadt, Germany. [1] It draws from conversations between the authors that highlighted how our approaches to brainstorming were eerily similar to the approaches of the tech-activist cultures we were trying to understand and challenge. We recognised that our pre-emptive questioning, pausing, and experimenting were mirroring the ongoing tensions between thinking and doing. Our own occasional utterances of things like ‘Oh, lets first get things done!’ made us realise we were all projecting from our particular—professional, political, personal—contexts. We came to recognise how we mimicked the same logic of what we identified and critiqued as a normative western male-dominated approaches that naturalise hegemonic divisions…
FCJ-195 Privacy, Responsibility, and Human Rights Activism
Becky Kazansky Tactical Technology Collective [Abstract] Introduction Tactical Technology Collective (Tactical Tech) is an international Non-Governmental Organisation focused on supporting the effective use of information in advocacy. Tactical Tech has spent a decade listening to, documenting, and responding to activists’ privacy and digital security needs and challenges across the world, often in contexts where the free flow of information is constrained. This vantage point has allowed Tactical Tech to observe the transnational spread of digital surveillance technologies, and their use against human rights activists (Hankey and O’Clunaigh, 2013; Notley and Hankey, 2013). Stories of monitoring and intrusion facilitated through digital surveillance technologies have been relayed to Tactical Tech in training events, through research and documentation field trips, at conferences and workshops, and via networks and activist media. These stories confirm the kinds of harms described and theorised in surveillance studies literature and in reports by civil society organisations documenting the…
FCJ-193 Harbouring Dissent: Greek Independent and Social Media and the Antifascist Movement
Sky Croeser Curtin University Tim Highfield Queensland University of Technology [Abstract] Introduction Activists’ uses of digital technologies are complex, and technologies are not only shaping the available possibilities for social change but are also being changed themselves through activists’ work. In this article we look at Greek activists’ use of a range of communication technologies, including social media like Twitter and Facebook, blogs, citizen journalism sites, Web radio, anonymous networks, and email. We use Anna Tsing’s (2005) model of friction to understand how frictions might productively influence or slow the use of particular digital technologies, examining the intersections between human and non-human actors, ideologies and experiences, in influencing the choices made by activists. Our analysis focuses on the Greek antifascist movement, primarily in Athens, noting that ‘the antifascist movement’ is largely a constructed object. We see Greek anarchist and anti-authoritarian organising as a key element of this movement, and note…
FCJ-194 From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: The Digital Intimacies of Race-Activist Hashtag Publics
Nathan Rambukanna Wilfrid Laurier University [Abstract] Much has been written about the news potential of blogs and microblogs (see for example Siles, 2011; Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012; Bastos et al., 2013), as well as about the political potential of online space in general (e.g., Bohman, 2004; DeLuca and Peeples, 2002; Downey and Fenton, 2003). In fact, since the dawn of the Internet age, discussion of the democratic potential of Internet-mediated space has been one of the major top level conversations. Yet a lot of that discussion gets mired in an orthodox Habermasian take on what we should consider a democratic public sphere—that is, one where rational critical discourse on matters of societal importance (such as, most critically, the actions of the State) can take place; populated by citizens stepping out of their private roles as interested individuals and into a public space where they become participants in disinterested discussion and…
FCJ-192 Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and Challenge the Paradigms of Civil Disobedience
Theresa Züger Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society Stefania Milan University of Amsterdam Leonie Maria Tanczer Queen’s University Belfast [Abstract] Introduction Oscar Wilde (1909) once wrote that ‘[d]isobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.’ In that sense, civil disobedience, which is a dissident form of political protest (Hahn, 2008: 1365), is embedded in a historical context and enables societal advancement while also leading to public friction. As society faces inequality, global mass surveillance and unequal power dynamics, civil disobedience has certainly not lost its importance in the twenty-first century. However, due to the development of the Internet and its broad use and deployment, the tactics and tools of civil disobedience have changed. We are witnessing acts of disobedience in both an offline and online context, which highlight the diversity of…
FCJ-191 Mirroring the Videos of Anonymous: Cloud Activism, Living Networks, and Political Mimesis
Adam Fish Lancaster University [Abstract] Introduction In August 2012, Wikileaks was hit with a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from a mysterious group appropriately titled Antileaks. DDoS assaults occur when multiple computers simultaneously ‘refresh’ a website causing it to overload and shutdown. A shaken-up Wikileaks tweeted: ‘The range of IPs used is huge. Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them’ (Kerr, 2012). This is a constant problem for Wikileaks. Their website reads: ‘WikiLeaks is currently under heavy attack. In order to fully protect the CableGate archives, we ask you to mirror it again’ (Wikileaks.org). Eventually repelling the Antileaks attack, Wikileaks again took to Twitter to boast: ‘DDoS proof, financially & geographically diverse. We’re ready to rumble’ (Kerr, 2012). For Wikileaks, mirroring means copying and pasting the CableGate archives in resilient servers so that the content remains visible. Infamous for Guy Fawkes…
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