The ‘popular’ culture of internet activism

How does the internet contribute to changes in civic engagement in the USA? To answer this question we must examine the institutional context of US marketizing civil society and the cultures of good citizenship constructed online. Drawing upon the findings from a case study of ONE, a campaign targeting extreme poverty and the spread of AIDS, I demonstrate how the internet may function as a space of new divisions of labor between civil society organizational actors and lay activists. While organizational actors use Web 2.0 to make activism convenient and standardized, the public is asked to participate in what I term ‘visual labor’, creating and representing images of community online that legitimize the organization’s claims. At the same time, volunteer action is understood largely as performative. Ultimately, the article confronts the understanding of the internet as a post-bureaucratic democracy and emphasizes its cultural role in communicative capitalism.

[1]  Samantha King,et al.  Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy , 2006 .

[2]  John Cameron,et al.  Development Made Sexy: how it happened and what it means , 2008 .

[3]  Kathryn Montgomery,et al.  Youth as e-citizens: engaging the digital generation , 1970 .

[4]  R. J. Maratea,et al.  The e-Rise and Fall of Social Problems: The Blogosphere as a Public Arena , 2008 .

[5]  Bruce Bimber.  Information and American Democracy: Contents , 2003 .

[6]  David B. Nieborg,et al.  Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos , 2009, New Media Soc..

[7]  S. Schneider.  Creating a Democratic Public Sphere Through Political Discussion , 1996 .

[8]  Kerry Smith,et al.  Researching the Information Commons Group » Blog Archive » The Googlization of Everything and the Future of Copyright , 2010 .

[9]  Antje Gimmler.  Deliberative democracy, the public sphere and the internet , 2001 .

[10]  Deborah Both,et al.  Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement. , 2007 .

[11]  P. Bourdieu,et al.  The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature , 1993 .

[12]  Shanyang Zhao.  The Internet and the Transformation of the Reality of Everyday Life: Toward a New Analytic Stance in Sociology , 2006 .

[13]  Adam Arvidsson,et al.  ‘Quality singles’: internet dating and the work of fantasy , 2006, New Media Soc..

[14]  F. Webster,et al.  Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power. By Bruce Bimber. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv+268. $65.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper). , 2004 .

[15]  Patricia Mooney Nickel,et al.  A Critique of the Discourse of Marketized Philanthropy , 2009 .

[16]  M. Chayko.  Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age , 2002 .

[17]  Tiziana Terranova.  Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy , 2000 .

[18]  Dimitrina S. Dimitrova,et al.  Computer Networks as Social Networks: Collaborative Work, Telework, and Virtual Community , 1996 .

[19]  Zizi Papacharissi.  The virtual sphere , 2002, New Media Soc..

[20]  G. Caruso,et al.  Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization , 2012 .

[21]  Zizi Papacharissi,et al.  Democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups , 2004, New Media Soc..

[22]  D. Hindman.  The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier , 1996 .

[23]  Angela M. Eikenberry,et al.  The Marketization of the Nonprofit Sector: Civil Society at Risk? , 2004 .

[24]  Jodi Dean,et al.  Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics , 2009 .

[25]  Peter Ester,et al.  Debating Civil Society , 2003 .

[26]  Philip E. Agre,et al.  Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process , 2002, Inf. Soc..

[27]  Philip Smith,et al.  The discourse of American civil society: A new proposal for cultural studies , 1993 .

[28]  Andrew J. Flanagin,et al.  Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment , 2005 .

[29]  J. Dean.  Why the Net is not a Public Sphere , 2003 .

[30]  M. Castells.  The rise of the network society , 1996 .

[31]  Christian Lahusen.  International Campaigns in Context: Collective Action between the Local and the Global , 1999 .

[32]  Keith N. Hampton,et al.  Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb , 2003 .

[33]  T. Skocpol,et al.  Voice and Inequality: The Transformation of American Civic Democracy , 2004, Perspectives on Politics.

[34]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[35]  David Beer,et al.  Social network(ing) sites...revisiting the story so far: A response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison , 2008, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..