In 2004, Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kinport determined that works on Internet activism tended to have depth but to lack representativeness, and so they decided to conduct a population-level study of the Web's impact on social protest. They collected a quasi-random sample of Websites that engaged in protest, archived the sites, coded their content, and interviewed several site administrators. The result is a book that is not only well researched but also thoroughly embedded in the literature on social movements. Digitally Enabled Social Change may well become a classic for those partial to social movement studies.
The conceptual centerpiece of the book is the idea of “leveraged affordance.” Earl and Kinport define an affordance as “the actions and uses that a technology makes … easier or possible when compared to prior like technologies” (p. 32). The Web offers two affordances that can profoundly transform protest activity. For organizers, there is the cost affordance, or the Web's ability to lower the cost they incur in creating protest opportunities. For participants, the cost affordance applies as well: Completing a petition from one's desk via point-and-click saves time and money, compared to completing a paper petition at a public location. In addition, the Web gives protesters a co-presence affordance: For the first time in social movement history, participants may be separated in time and space while still being able to protest as a collectivity. The possibility to make claims without being physically identified with a “troublesome minority” has the added benefit of avoiding the stigmatization that can come with membership in a movement.
On the basis of the extent to which these two affordances are leveraged, the authors draw a continuum of protest activities. On the one end lie e-mobilizations. These use the Web in limited ways, mostly as a means for sharing information. On the other end are e-movements. They leverage the Web's affordances very heavily, and both the “organization of and participation in the movement occurs entirely online” (p. 12). In between the two poles are numerous variations of e-tactics, which combine online and offline elements and furnish the bulk of this book's data.
Earl and Kimport find that protest organizers are not equally adept at leveraging the Web's affordances. In movements dominated by poor leverage, social movement organizations (SMOs) will remain at the heart of protest activities because they excel at mobilizing the resources needed to defray the high costs of activism. Under poor leverage, the potential scale of protest increases, but the underlying dynamics of contention remain the same. Of social movement scholars, this change in scale simply demands a “supersizing” of theoretical approaches they applied to the offline world. There are, however, organizers who leverage the affordances of the Web exceedingly well. In their hands, protest activity undergoes a fundamental transformation, requiring that movement theorists proceed to a new generation of theoretical model, which the authors call “theory 2.0.”
Because activists differ widely in their Web proficiency, Earl and Kimport expect the landscape of contention to exhibit both supersize and theory 2.0 elements. Here are a number of specific consequences they envision. First, the costs of activism vary widely. In the offline world, the costs of protest tended to be uniformly high. Hence, resource mobilization theory treated cost as a central factor in the planning of protest and assumed that it took SMOs to pull in the resources that would pay for specific campaigns. Because in the digital era organizers vary in their ability to leverage the cost affordance, costs are no longer a central factor, or constant. Instead, they vary among e-tactics and should be treated as variables.
Second, because costs are now variable, SMOs lose their central position as coordinators for claims making. They are most relevant where costs are higher. Single individuals, or “lone wolves,” often take their place as organizers where protest costs are low. The emergence of lone wolves is also facilitated by the co-presence affordance.
Third, we should see a surge in “five minute activism.” Traditionally, the free-rider problem—that is, the tendency of people to enjoy a public service without contributing to paying for its provision—stymied collective action and was seen as an obstacle to the formation of social movements. Now, with the costs of participating in protest decreasing, the free-rider problem diminishes as an obstacle to collective action, and general willingness to participate in contention will increase. Hence, we should see more instances of five-minute activism, that is, short and ephemeral bouts of mobilization.
Fourth, people will organize around a much wider array of causes, some of them “nonpolitical.”
Points three and four directly challenge the definition of the social movement as group action that is extended in time and aimed at affecting or resisting social change. Consequently, the authors call on social movement scholars to clearly define protest, contention, and social movements because in an age of increased variety, they may refer to markedly divergent phenomena. Moreover, they suggest that “if these trends continue, instead of social movements being the top-level concept, protest might become the more inclusive term” (p. 188).
Digitally Enabled Social Change has limitations, and the authors acknowledge as much when they point out that the process of data collection ended in 2004 and preceded the recent upsurge in social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. Another limitation—and one that the authors acknowledge only in the conclusion and the appendix—is that their examined population of Websites is really only the English-language population of Websites. It is quite plausible that the findings of this book will travel into several other linguistic and cultural contexts, but that needs to be ascertained, not assumed.
That the data collection is a few years old does not weaken the claims of the book. Only a year ago, the “lone wolf” Google executive Wael Ghonim proved central to launching the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. As this reviewer determined by analyzing his Facebook posts, Ghonim leveraged the affordances of the Web superbly. This shows that lone wolf organizers do exist and can have an impact. And then there is the case of Chord Overstreet, a cast member of the musical show Glee. When fans found out in June 2011 that he would not return as a regular to the show's third season, they rallied, purchasing his single “Billionaire” on iTunes and pushing it to iTunes' “Glee” Top 10. Overstreet is now back on the show. Five-minute activism for nonpolitical causes does exist.
The great beauty of this book is the simplicity of its central concept, the “leveraged affordance,” and the way in which it is tied both to the empirical data and the literatures on social movements, as well as to science and technology studies. Digitally Enabled will give researchers food for thought. Perhaps it will even manage to draw scholars who study the Web from different disciplinary vantage points into a shared conversation.
