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Activism
Diana Daly
Key points
The Zapatista movement creatively used online activism to counter the negative impact of NAFTA on indigenous communities in Mexico.
The internet played a dual role for both activists and governments, with a focus on how the Zapatistas employed information warfare to gain global support.
Drawing parallels between Zapatistas and contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter underscores the role of online activism in tackling issues of race, income inequality, and political decisions.
Utilizing strategies such as speed, visuals, performances, inclusiveness, and “masked” leadership, both Zapatista and Black Lives Matter movements showcased effective online activism.
Addressing critiques, concerns include the swift mobilization of movements, potential shallowness, and the notion of “slacktivism.”
Acknowledging the intricate interplay between key figures and networked groups highlights the dynamic and evolving nature of successful online activism.
Before the internet was an effective product marketing tool, it was a tool of activism – and social media has extended and complicated the ways activists can use it (in other words, its activist affordances). This chapter takes a few key movements as examples – from 1994 when Mexico’s Zapatista movement forced the Mexican government into a ceasefire, to 2017 when Black Lives Matter hashtags now quickly activate publics in the US and beyond. I refer to these movements under the umbrella of creative online activism. What ties these movements together is their creativity in using the affordances of the internet to promote activist agendas and avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification and appropriation.
Note: This chapter focuses on movements that have coalesced (formed) around racial and ethnic identity groups, as well as income inequality and political decisions.
Section 1: The Zapatistas
In early 1994, only a tiny percentage of the world was online, and the term “social media” did not exist. The internet was very young and very Web 1.0, with static pages that did not allow visitors to contribute. (You can review Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 in Chapter 2). Yet our first example of creative online activism begins here, with Mexico’s Zapatistas. Creative deployment of the affordances of a young, sparse internet both saved indigenous protesters in Chiapas, Mexico from slaughter and allowed them to influence the new global economy.
The beginning of the story was the end of life as many in rural Mexico knew it. Governments of the US, Canada, and Mexico began negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s, forging interdependence between their economies. Among other deals, this trade agreement would subsidize corporations taking over Mexican land to grow cheap crops. Many Mexicans – particularly the native, or indigenous, people – foresaw that this would lead to drastic alteration of the land and to farming by genetic crop modification and spraying of chemical pesticides.
As their political leaders worked toward NAFTA, Mexican farmers fought it using traditional methods. In the early 1990s, protestors staged in-person demonstrations at the zocalo (town square) in Mexico City. And they organized and wrote impassioned statements in print media about the devastating consequences NAFTA would have on farming and many other aspects of life in their country. But North American governments ignored these offline pleas and signed NAFTA into effect in 1992 and 1993.
On January 1st, 1994, NAFTA became the law of the land in the US, Mexico, and Canada – and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rose up against the Mexican Government under the leadership of a masked man known as Subcomandante (Subcommander) Marcos. This army of “Zapatistas” – an army of mostly poor, rural, indigenous people inspired by the historic Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata – peacefully occupied the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas, to demand that their protests against NAFTA be seen and heard. Rising up against the Mexican government seemed like a catastrophic move by the EZLN occupiers, many of whom were poor indigenous farmers from the Chiapas area.
The Mexican government was enthusiastic about NAFTA, as they would benefit financially from corporate NAFTA investment even if their farmers suffered. So it seemed certain the formidable Mexican army would covertly slaughter the small EZLN forces before their protest could make Mexico look bad as a corporate investment. But ironically, in this case, the internet was what Martinez-Torres describes as Janus faced, helping governments repress people while helping those people protest that repression at the same time. While young, online global networks made it possible for economies to globalize and to crush poor people in the process, they also made it possible to mobilize networks of popular protest and fight back.
Enter information warfare
When on-the-ground resistance alone got the Zapatistas little traction in their resistance to NAFTA, they turned to the internet and began a campaign of information warfare – the strategic use of information and its anticipated effects on receivers to influence the power dynamics in a conflict. Thanks to the affordances of the early internet to connect people in similar struggles in different places, international peace activists were already networked online in the mid-1990s; the Internet Archive has lists and snapshots of pages describing some of these organizations. Some of these activist organizations were witnessing or supporting similar struggles in other countries, as poor people battled transnational trade agreements that would destroy their ways of life.
The EZLN Army got the international word out about their cause with remarkable speed, thanks to these online peace networks. With the charismatic masked leader Subcommandante Marcos as a spokesperson, the EZLN Zapatistas created a dramatic campaign online. Their vivid imagery of the EZLN’s masked army of farmers spread rapidly across international online networks.
At the height of their online visibility, twelve days after declaring war on the Mexican Government, the Zapatistas publicly called for a ceasefire. The Mexican government still had the physical power to annihilate EZLN – but now the world was watching. Once EZLN called for peace, any action against their forces would make Mexico look evil – and risky as a corporate investment destination. As a result, the Mexican government was forced to accept the EZLN ceasefire. They could not reverse NAFTA; it would take more than an awareness campaign to reverse such a powerfully backed agreement. But the EZLN protesters lived and continued their demands for social change.
The EZLN’s Information War has inspired many civil society movements visible today. These include current movements against genetically modified food and the “fair trade” compensation for farmers. In terms of online strategies, the Zapatistas’ activist campaign was an early example of how activists can use media sociopolitically to demand civil rights – and to recognize how, Janus-faced, those same media can also work against those rights.
In the next sections, I demonstrate how the Zapatistas’ strategies fall under the umbrella of creative online activism and why such strategies remain powerful.
Section 2: Creative online activism in recent times
Organizers have continued using the internet to mobilize, and their work has arguably been made easier with the development of mobile phone apps and social media. This timeline by Mashable gives a selective overview of noted online activist movements through 2011.
Creative online activism has developed in conjunction with social media apps since the mid-2000s. These apps are certainly not created equal when it comes to facilitating activism; in fact, some have been found to intentionally hinder the exposure of social injustice. For example, although they have had a huge user base for the last decade, Facebook algorithms have been found to hide or slow controversial and “negative” stories from its users’ feeds, making it a poor platform for activism.
But the platform is only a small part of the recipe for an activist movement. Human creativity has facilitated the use of technologies in activism in ways software developers never imagined. In a typical example of human shaping of technology, Twitter leadership didn’t build hashtags into the platform intentionally and even rejected the idea that they would be widely used; human users proved them wrong. Several years later, Twitter hashtags began playing important roles in online activism, including in the Arab Spring protests.
Student Insights: Political campaigning in the 21st century (video & writing by Jessica Nickerson, Fall 2020)
Music: Automaton en Avant by Scanglobe, CC-BY -NC.
Respond to this case study: What strategies made Tana’s campaign uniquely suited to social media, as opposed to traditional electoral media like newspaper advertisements, television commercials, and campaign mailers? Describe another political messaging campaign or endorsement that grabbed your attention in recent years. Describe the platform(s) involved, the technological affordances, and how your various publics responded.
Social media platforms like Twitter are sometimes practically credited with creating movements, but this technological determinism fails to recognize how much complex human wrangling is required to run an online campaign and keep control of its message. Only a small percentage of protestors used Twitter to exchange key information and then disseminated that information through face-to-face communication and other media. All messages that spread widely online face the threat of oversimplification and appropriation; only the best-executed retain their depth and complexity. And, regardless of platform, the real work for social change still happens across various digital and analog (non-digital) platforms – and most crucially, on the ground.
Student Insights: #SettleForBiden (audio by Lilly, Fall 2020)
Respond to this case study: In her audio piece, this author focuses on the use of the hashtag #SettleForBiden. In what ways could this hashtag fall under the category of creative online activism? In what ways could it be considered slacktivism?
Section 3: The Black Lives Matter Movement
One of the most well-known online movements to date is Black Lives Matter. The central phrase and hashtag of this movement came from Alicia Garza and Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac in July 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of 12-year-old Trayvon Martin. Armed with this concise phrase – and fueled by outrage over injustices against black citizens by American institutions including law enforcement today – Black Lives Matter has built into a sophisticated movement online and offline with profound influence on government policy and popular consciousness.
Although its signature phrase began online, the Black Lives Matter movement gained traction over the next year as Twitter users deployed #BlackLivesMatter to mobilize on the ground. Subsequent hashtags used in connection with #BlackLivesMatter networked protestors and helped them assemble massive on-the-ground demonstrations very quickly after subsequent police killings. These included #ferguson to organize protests in Ferguson, Missouri after police were acquitted in the killing of Michael Brown there in November 2014.
Student Insights: Social Media and the Right to Vote (video & writing by Trinity, Fall 2020)
Respond to this case study: This writer argues that her generation (perhaps your generation as well) was influenced from a young age by the ubiquity of the Internet and social media technologies. Drawing on your knowledge from this course, our readings, and your own experiences, describe your own position on this claim.
Section 4: Creative online activist strategies in Black Lives Matter and beyond
Black Lives Matter campaigns have deployed several strategies that were key to the EZLN campaign, as well as to other online activist movements. To make it easy to understand the strategies these movements deployed in common, I will list them and describe them in the next section.
Five strategies deployed by creative online activist movements:
1. Speed
2. Visuals
3. Performances
4. Inclusiveness
5. “Masked” leadership
1. Speed
Like the Zapatista online campaign, it was crucial in 2015 that Black Lives Matter protestors mobilize with speed. Responding fast to the actions of government or authorities allowed both movements to gather large publics when outrage over authorities’ decisions was high. In Black Lives Matter, an immediate response also sent the message that this public would not tolerate police violence any longer – effective immediately.
2. Visuals
In both the Zapatista and Black Lives Matter movements, campaign organizers gathered attention through the effective use of visual content. Images of the masked Zapatista army are still widely circulated online. This article in WIRED Magazine explores the spreadable content of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially the visuals – photographs easily shared online that evoked the in-person experience of being black, in protest.
3. Performances
We must also remember the performances involved in each of these protests. The Zapatistas called a truce at a dramatic moment that would have cast the Mexican government as the villain if they continued to fight the small EZLN army. In Black Lives Matter, hashtags like #HandsUpDontShoot remind us that these protestors moved together in synced gestures that gave tremendous energy to their on-the-ground protests. Reenactment has also been an effective performance strategy, exemplified in protestors using the #icantbreathe hashtag to reenact the video of Eric Garner dying after police ignored his repeated pleas of “I can’t breathe.”
Online activism scholar Paolo Gerbaudo phrases it this way: Online media can be used for the “choreography of assembly” in organizing on-the-ground demonstrations. That is, online organizers can choreograph individual acts of cultural repetition (memes, discussed more in Chapter 7), such as clothing or gestures protestors can repeat to recognize and reinforce one another’s work. And they can organize the meeting places, escape routes, and conduct massive groups of people. Gerbaudo notes that these actions can influence public consciousness most powerfully when they occur in a symbolic center – some meaningful public place that serves as a theatrical stage for activism to be seen and performed. A park in a city center, a football field, the Olympic medal ceremonies, and a memorial statue: All of these have been symbolic centers for protest in the US and abroad.
4. Inclusiveness
Black Lives Matter’s strategy was also similar to the Zapatistas’ in the inclusiveness of the campaign. It was understood and stated by those in the movement that women must have equal access to the rights being fought for, and that in-family violence was part of what they were fighting. In Black Lives Matter, rights around gender and sexuality were always part of the discussion, as exemplified in this movement “herstory.”
Today’s social media-fueled movements tend to use rhetoric that acknowledges differences in power among the people they fight for or represent. This sets modern rights campaigns apart from some rights movements in the past. Both the Civil Rights and Black Panther movements focused on black men more than other citizens. The 20th-century women’s rights movements focused more on white women than any others. The 20th-century gay rights movement centralized the identities of white gay men. “Not your grandfather’s civil rights movement,” is one way Black Lives Matter has been described, reminding us that today’s movements broaden the focus from fathers and grandfathers to the rest of the family, the organization, and the community.
5. “Masked” organizers
In modern online activism, leaders wear masks – literally, and sometimes, figuratively. In the 20th-century, a much-remembered feature of social activism campaigns like the Civil Rights Movement was their visible leadership and culture of “heroes.” Dr. Martin Luther King is commonly remembered as the “father” of the Civil Rights Movement. Meanwhile, as this article by Jamil Cobb on Black Lives Matter reminds us, there were other strategies at work in the Civil Rights movement as well as leaders who shunned the spotlight, like Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Today, the branding has shifted, with many declaring today’s online activist movements “leaderless.”
The Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos was a bridge between these two styles of organization, the 20th-century heroic leader versus the 21st-century decentralized campaign. Marcos was the Zapatistas’ most visible “hero.” But he wore a mask, hid his true identity, and chose the false title of “Subcommander” (subordinate Commander) rather than “Commander.” A decade later, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous began organizing actions on 4chan in which the identities of the organizers and participants were not known; Anonymous made significant appearances during protests against the World Trade Organization. More recently, there have been figurative masks on many popular online movements including Occupy Wall Street, with all insisting there are no leaders. The strategy of “masked” organizers makes a movement difficult to defeat, while also resisting the persistent surveillance that is a function of the internet, and that can get activists jailed or killed.
Section 5: Advancing and complicating social activism through online engagement
There are many critiques of online activism as inferior to more traditional forms of activism. For example, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufecki argues that by removing the hard work and shared risk of social organizing, social media technologies gather demonstrators too quickly for them to understand one another and think together. In another critique, scholar Evgeny Morozov uses the term “slacktivism” to characterize certain low-risk levels of “activism” such as signing online petitions, which offer participants the illusion they are contributing significantly, at zero risk to themselves. While these critiques may overlook the subtle shifts in the public consciousness that online chatter can affect, they have merit. As illustrated by the Zapatistas in Chiapas and Black Lives Matter in Missouri, online activism is at its most powerful when on-the-ground action provides roots to online campaigns.
However they are branded, successful online activism movements are never dependent only on leaders, and they are also never leaderless. Rather, modern activist movements in the US in particular are often ignited through interactions between key driving forces or personalities and then mobilized by networked groups of people who respond together. This idea, which author David Karpf has called an “organizational layer” of American political advocacy, may be the closest we can come to accurately describing the real effects of the internet on how we do activism.
Hate and Power — Social Media and Ourselves podcast
Hate and Power
Release date: August 1st, 2021
Our Media Lab student worker Jacquie Kuru explores her personal experience and understanding of Asian American hate through discussions with Professor Daly and fellow classmate Alicia Nguyen. Theme music by Gabe Stultz. Music backtracks and audio story by Jacquie Kuru. Produced by Jacquie Kuru, Diana Daly, and iVoices Media Lab.
Respond to this podcast episode…How did the podcast episode “Hate and Power” use interviews, student voices, or sounds to demonstrate a current or past social trend phenomenon? If you were making a sequel to this episode, what voices or sounds would you include to help listeners understand more about this trend, and why?
a sophisticated movement online and offline, fueled by outrage over injustices against black citizens by American institutions including law enforcement today
activist movements that deploy creativity in using the affordances of the internet to promote activist agendas and avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification and appropriation
an agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada in the early 1990s forging interdependence between their economies, including subsidies for corporations taking over Mexican land to grow cheap crops
political scientist David Karpf’s term for the networked groups of people responding together who he argues form the most important agents for change in American political advocacy today
coined by Evgeny Morozov, this concept relates to critiques of online activism as inferior to more traditional forms of activism, with organizing online perceived as so fast, easy, and risk-free, it results in insufficient gains or change
Paulo Gerbaudo’s term for a meaningful public place that serves as a theatrical stage for activism to be seen and performed, such as park in a city center, a football field, the Olympic medal ceremonies, or a memorial statue
an army of mostly poor, rural, indigenous people rose up against the Mexican government in 1994, and successfully used the early internet to reach out for witnesses and support
Core Questions
A. Questions for qualitative thought:
Design a hypothetical online activist campaign for a cause you care about. Utilize the strategies discussed in the chapter and consider the potential challenges and opportunities you might face in the current digital landscape.
Brainstorm ways to bridge the gap between online and offline activism, maximizing the collective impact of both spheres. How can online initiatives inspire on-the-ground action and vice versa?
Compare and contrast how the Zapatista and Black Lives Matter movements utilized the specific technological affordances of their respective eras (early web vs. social media) to achieve their goals. How did historical and cultural contexts influence their choices and the overall effectiveness of their online strategies?
B. Review: Which is the best answer?
C. Game on!
Related Content
Read It: As school students strike for climate once more, here’s how the movement and its tactics have changed
On Friday, students will once again down textbooks and laptops and go on strike for climate action. Many will give their schools a Climate Doctor’s Certificate signed by three leading climate academics.
These strikes – part of a National Climate Strike – mark five years since school students started walking out of schools to demand greater action on climate change. In 2018, the first students to strike defied calls by then prime minister Scott Morrison for “less activism” and to stay in school.
Last year, Australia voted out the Morrison government, in what was widely seen as a climate election. Teal independents won Liberal heartland seats on climate platforms, while the Greens recorded high votes. Labor came to office promising faster action on climate.
So why are school students still striking? Has the movement changed its focus? We have been researching these questions alongside young people involved in climate action in the ongoing Striking Voices project, as well as through the coauthor’s Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity project.
We found the movement has expanded its demands from climate action to climate justice, stressing the uneven and unfair distribution of climate impacts. The movement itself has also become more diverse.
From climate action to climate justice
Across the world, young climate advocates such as those from School Strike 4 Climate are calling for “climate justice” alongside “climate action”.
Why? Because climate change doesn’t impact everyone equally. As the Australian Youth Climate Coalition puts it, it’s “often the most marginalised in our societies who are hit first and worst by climate impacts and carry the burden of polluting industries”.
Mere semantics? No. The idea of climate justice draws attention to existing social and ethical injustices which climate change amplifies. The phrase also points to the need for climate solutions that work for people in a transformative way and help create collective and just societies.
In Australia, calls for climate justice are intimately connected with justice for First Nations people and to protecting, defending and “heal[ing] Country”, as Seed Mob write, with First Nations-led solutions.
In our conversations with young people, climate justice appears highly compelling. High-school student Yehansa Dahanayake explained:
I think I’d always thought of climate change as sort of a 2D thing. I thought about it as the temperature rise, deforestation, and sea caps melting – and while that is definitely true, I think [when] I started to learn about the justice aspects of climate change, [it] made me realise that there are many other factors that tie in, such as the Global North/ Global South difference and how that relates.
High-school student Emma Heyink told us about the importance of what she called a “justice-centred lens”:
You can’t look at climate change without looking at all these other issues. It just becomes so much more interlinked and solutions become so much more obvious.
Diversifying networks and strategies
So who are these young people, and what have they been doing in recent years?
Swedish student Greta Thunberg is frequently credited as sparking the youth-led climate movement.
But the movement is much larger – and more diverse – than one person, and increasingly so in recent years.
As a report by Sapna points out, Australia’s youth-led climate justice networks are more likely to be racially diverse than mainstream climate movements.
Yet climate justice networks are not immune from the oppressive dynamics they protest against. When the coauthor interviewed 12 now-graduated school strikers of South Asian heritage, they reported sometimes feeling sidelined in climate spaces – which are often white-dominated – as well as in media opportunities. As one young person put it, it seemed “hard to tell a brown person’s climate justice story”.
There are signs of positive change. The upheaval of the COVID pandemic saw stronger connections emerge between social movements, and clearer links between intersecting crises and injustices, both globally and in youth-led climate networks.
As recent high-school graduate and school strike organiser Owen Magee explained:
at our strikes, we are platforming First Nations people, rural and regional people who’ve directly been affected by the climate crisis, directly being affected by fossil fuel greed and corporation greed. That in itself is focusing on the intersectional nature of climate justice.
You can see this cross-pollination in the support shown by young advocates across multiple climate justice networks in the Power Up gathering on Gomeroi Country in northwestern New South Wales to show solidarity with Traditional Owners fighting coal and gas projects on their lands.
The targets and tactics of youth-led climate justice networks have shifted and proliferated in recent years – for example, to the banks that finance fossil fuel companies.
Some have taken part in strategic climate litigation in a bid to create legislation embedding a climate duty of care for young people in government decisions on issues such as fracking approvals.
Others are involved in non-violent direct actions, such as next week’s Rising Tide People’s Blockade of the world’s largest coal port in Newcastle.
Young climate advocates are battling for climate justice on a wide range of fronts. They are calling on politicians to do the same.
We would like to acknowledge and thank the Striking Voices project research associates, Natasha Abhayawickrama, Sophie Chiew, Netta Maiava and Dani Villafaña.
Also, consider findings from the Pew Research Center’s 2018 study of American perceptions of the internet as a tool for social activism.
Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufecki argued in 2015 that the tools to organize activist movements online may move too fast to build coalitions that “think together”. Whether that was true then, is it now? Support your answer, including what might you say to others in the Pew polls who think differently than you in order to explain your views.
Activist movements that deploy creativity in using the affordances of the internet to promote activist agendas and avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification and appropriation.
An army of mostly poor, rural, indigenous people rose up against the Mexican government in 1994, and successfully used the early internet to reach out for witnesses and support.
An agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada in the early 1990s forging interdependence between their economies, including subsidies for corporations taking over Mexican land to grow cheap crops.
A symbol, derived from ancient Roman mythology, of something that simultaneously works toward two opposing goals.
The strategic use of information and its anticipated effects on receivers to influence the power dynamics in a conflict
A sophisticated movement online and offline, fueled by outrage over injustices against black citizens by American institutions including law enforcement today
Paulo Gerbaudo's term describing how successful online organizers preplan social activist movements that will ensue on the ground.
Paulo Gerbaudo's term for a meaningful public place that serves as a theatrical stage for activism to be seen and performed, such as park at a city center, a football field, the Olympic medal ceremonies, or a memorial statue.
Coined by Evgeny Morozov, this concept relates to critiques of online activism as inferior to more traditional forms of activism, with organizing online perceived as so fast, easy, and risk-free, it results in insufficient gains or change.
Political scientist David Karpf's term for the networked groups of people responding together who he argues form the most important agents for change in American political advocacy today.
Dr. Diana Daly of the University of Arizona is the Director of iVoices, a media lab helping students produce media from their narratives on technologies. Prof Daly teaches about qualitative research, social media, and information quality at the University of Arizona.
definition
Activist movements that deploy creativity in using the affordances of the internet to promote activist agendas and avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification and appropriation.
An army of mostly poor, rural, indigenous people rose up against the Mexican government in 1994, and successfully used the early internet to reach out for witnesses and support.
An agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada in the early 1990s forging interdependence between their economies, including subsidies for corporations taking over Mexican land to grow cheap crops.
A symbol, derived from ancient Roman mythology, of something that simultaneously works toward two opposing goals.
The strategic use of information and its anticipated effects on receivers to influence the power dynamics in a conflict
A sophisticated movement online and offline, fueled by outrage over injustices against black citizens by American institutions including law enforcement today
Paulo Gerbaudo's term describing how successful online organizers preplan social activist movements that will ensue on the ground.
Paulo Gerbaudo's term for a meaningful public place that serves as a theatrical stage for activism to be seen and performed, such as park at a city center, a football field, the Olympic medal ceremonies, or a memorial statue.
Coined by Evgeny Morozov, this concept relates to critiques of online activism as inferior to more traditional forms of activism, with organizing online perceived as so fast, easy, and risk-free, it results in insufficient gains or change.
Political scientist David Karpf's term for the networked groups of people responding together who he argues form the most important agents for change in American political advocacy today.