Despite the impact that Internet-mediated advocacy organizations have had on American politics over the last decade, we are still learning about how they work. This is even truer for Internet-mediated issue specialists that focus on a single issue, such as climate change. Based on interviews with key staff members of two climate change advocacy campaigns, this article examines how these organizations communicate and mobilize citizens around their issue and the underlying assumptions behind their strategies. Interviews revealed a focus on like-minded issue public mobilization and online-to-offline social movement building strategies. The paper also examines how these organizations can influence policy debates by mobilizing issue publics, shifting debates to more favorable public arenas, and reframing them in ways more favorable to their causes. Implications for the future of climate policy and Internet-mediated advocacy research are discussed.

If you have a chance to read the article, I’d love to get some feedback — not to mention citations, of course. Enjoy!

NOT available on the App Store

I’ve been sitting on this blog for a while but EFF’s excellent post on Apple’s “crystal prisons” finally made me get off my butt and publish it. It’s based on a more detailed analysis I did for a paper that I can provide upon request.

Should users of Apple’s iOS devices have access to an app that condemns marriage equality? How about an app that lets users create their own joke drivers licenses? Or an app that gives them access to content published by WikiLeaks, or another that advocates for a single-payer health care system in America?

Regardless of one’s opinion of the appropriateness, usefulness or political views represented in these apps, the fact is that whether they are available to iOS users is at the moment up to Apple and Apple alone—and that’s precisely the problem.

Since launching the revolutionary iPhone in the summer of 2007, Apple Inc. has become one of the leading manufacturers of mobile communication devices in the world, having sold more than 314 million iOS-based devices (including the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) to date. Apple’s dominant position in this market includes its App Store, which as of this writing boasts more than 585,000 apps and has surpassed 25 billion downloads. Apple’s iOS ecosystem has become a critical entry points unto the Internet, which is one of the most important platforms for political action and personal expression available today.

Unlike the Internet, however, the App Store is a relatively closed ecosystem. To gain access to the App Store, developers must have their apps approved by Apple. The company’s app review and approval policies have been criticized for being opaque and arbitrary, and have resulted in the rejection of both explicitly and implicitly political apps—including the apps listed at the top of this blog, as well as many others.

Some examples:

• NetToons gave users access to Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore’s animated cartoons. It was rejected at first but later approved after the rejection was publicized online.
• The Manhattan Declaration urged individuals to sign a petition condemning same-sex marriage. It was originally approved by Apple, but was then pulled after an online petition garnered just over 7,000 signatures.
• ThirdIntifada encouraged followers to share opinions and organize protests against Israel. It was removed from the app store at the urging of the Israeli government for allegedly encouraging violence against Israel.

These examples show that Apple’s app approval and rejection policies are fickle and arbitrary—a classic example of how private industry policies can have a significant impact on network governance (DeNardis, 2012). Apple’s willingness to allow apps to live on its store seem exceedingly vulnerable to outside pressures from the public or, perhaps most troubling, government officials.

The consequences of this highly unreliable approval and rejection process for freedom of expression and political action within the iOS ecosystem, and more generally on the Internet, are profound. Developers who wish to express themselves in either explicitly or implicitly political terms can never be sure whether their apps will be approved even if they comply with Apple’s technical guidelines—and if they are approved, whether they will stay available on the app store. This not only impacts developers’ ability to express themselves but their bottom lines as well.

Conversely, end users are consistently deprived of content that they might find interesting, compelling or stimulating in some way, as well of opportunities to take political action or express themselves in myriad ways through apps. In short, Apple’s app store policies interfere with what Jack Balkin (2004) calls a “democratic culture,” one in which “ordinary people can participate, both collectively and individually, in the creation and elaboration of cultural meanings that constitute them as individuals.”

The iOS ecosystem has become large enough and pervasive enough that Apple’s policies have a substantial effect on freedom of expression online. It is therefore perhaps time that we strongly consider applying the principles of net neutrality to the iOS ecosystem. In other words, “app neutrality” should govern the iOS app approval and rejection process in order to ensure that freedom of expression within the ecosystem, as well as the larger online ecosystem, is not only protected but also nurtured.

Just as we would not look kindly on a regime that arbitrarily rejects—or approves, then rejects—websites because of their political content, we should not look kindly on a regime that does precisely this on the mobile sphere. As the market for mobile devices and services continues to grow at a vertiginous pace, an expanded conception of “app neutrality” that includes app non-discrimination within mobile app stores should become an increasingly important part of the network neutrality debate.

Read more:

Balkin, J. M. (2004). Digital speech and democratic culture: a theory of freedom of expression for the information society. New York University Law Review, 79(1), 1. [.pdf]

DeNardis, L. (2012). Hidden Levers of Internet Control: An Infrastructure-Based Theory of Internet Governance. Journal of Information, Communication, and Society, 15(3). [abstract]

Spraying seawater droplets into marine clouds from ships could make them reflect more sunlight. Photograph: NASA

There is a story in the New Yorker this week about geoengineering research that could help avert the worst effects of climate change. Scientists around the world are looking into ways to alter the composition of the atmosphere in order to reflect sunlight back into space, extract existing CO₂ from the atmosphere, or other schemes to offset the expected rise in temperature through the rest of the century and beyond. Some of the schemes — such as pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to deflect the sun’s rays — are based on relatively well established science. Other ideas seem, well, more fanciful:

There have been proposals to send mirrors, sunshades, and parasols into space. Recently, the scientific entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold, whose company Intellectual Ventures has invested in several geoengineering ideas, said that we could cool the earth by stirring the seas. He has proposed deploying a million plastic tubes, each about a hundred metres long, to roil the water, which would help it trap more CO₂.

. . .

The Harvard physicist Russell Seitz wants to create what amounts to a giant oceanic bubble bath: bubbles trap air, which brightens them enough to reflect sunlight away from the surface of the earth. Another tactic would require maintaining a fine spray of seawater—the world’s biggest fountain—which would mix with salt to help clouds block sunlight.

The part of me that always seeks to maximize my sources of amusement would LOVE to live in a planet surrounded by mirrors, shades and parasols, with giant bubble baths, fountains and drink-stirrers sprouting from the oceans. But my enthusiasm for these geoengineering schemes is tempered by the fact that, as Trinity College engineering professor Hugh Hunt says, “If we have to use these tools, it means something on this planet has gone seriously wrong.’’

But what really caught my attention about the article was the reaction in some quarters of climate activism to the mere consideration of geoengineering as a last-ditch effort to avert climate disasters:

Last fall, the SPICE team decided to conduct a brief and uncontroversial pilot study. At least they thought it would be uncontroversial. To demonstrate how they would disperse the sulfur dioxide, they had planned to float a balloon over Norfolk, at an altitude of a kilometre, and send a hundred and fifty litres of water into the air through a hose. After the date and time of the test was announced, in the middle of September, more than fifty organizations signed a petition objecting to the experiment, in part because they fear that even to consider engineering the climate would provide politicians with an excuse for avoiding tough decisions on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Opponents of the water test pointed out the many uncertainties in the research (which is precisely why the team wanted to do the experiment). The British government decided to put it off for at least six months.

This seems like an illiberal attitude, to say the least, from what I presume is a collection of liberal organizations. Liberals are supposed to be the “reality-based community” that listens to evidence-based arguments and the best science available to design and implement policy, especially when it comes to climate change. In fact, these climate activists who stopped the Norfolk experiment wouldn’t even be activists if it wasn’t for climate science. What’s behind their attitude toward this particular bit of science that seems so at odds with their usual attitude?

Perhaps motivated reasoning has something to do with it. Motivated reasoning has been used to explain climate and other types of conservative scientific denial, but we liberals are not immune to explaining away facts that contradict our ideology. Of course, the scientific evidence for the feasibility of geoengineering is nowhere near the threshold that has been crossed by climate science overall, but the research that the scientists profiled in the New Yorker are conducting is not junk science. Yet the attitude in some climate activism quarters seems to be to not only deny the feasibility of these solutions, but to stop research on them altogether. That’s about as illiberal as it gets.

There is an added ethical dimension to this refusal to even consider geoengineering as a tool to fight climate change. The article states that unabated climate change and geoengineering have something in common: they could both end up benefitting richer nations while further impoverishing poorer nations and communities. If things get bad enough, geoengineering may go forward regardless of how climate activists and other liberals feel about it. Rather than try to shut down debate about geoengineering, liberals should engage in it fully in order to ensure that those most vulnerable to climate fluctuations are treated fairly in any global geoengineering processes.

Given how spectacularly national and world leaders have failed at dealing with climate change, the ideological predisposition to see geoengineering as a possible excuse for further inaction is understandable. But the scale of the problem, as well as the likelihood that leaders will not be able to act, even if they wanted to, because of human reluctance to alter the structure of the world economy or slow the pace of economic development, demand that all scientifically serious options be put on the table and explored to the fullest. Who tries to tackle a crisis with no ‘plan B’? That attitude may work in the movies, but real life requires contingency plans. Climate activists and other assorted liberals should keep pushing for aggressive policies to reduce CO₂ emissions, but they also need to acknowledge that their efforts may in the end fall short — and that we will need a backup plan if they do.

Kindle logo

One of the reasons digital content customers turn to file sharing services like BitTorrent is that content providers are often not meeting customers where they’re at in terms of their expectations. This fact was brought home to me over the past couple of weeks through both personal experience and an encounter with hilarious content on the Web.

First, the personal experience. Last week I lent a classmate a Kindle book for class. This being my first ebook loan, it never occurred to me that when I lent it out, I lost all ability to read the book until the loan was returned. And why would I? Why would I assume that Amazon would choose to replicate one of the worst characteristics of a physical book in digital form? I understand that if I had lent a physical book to my classmate I wouldn’t have been able to read it again until she returned it, but nothing of the sort occurred to me when I lent her the ebook.

When I realized this, I became exasperated, perhaps to an unreasonable degree, because it seemed so ludicrous. Granted, this is a First World Problem if there ever was one–although not as tragic as not having WiFi on the plane–but within my socioeconomic bubble, I believe I was within my rights to be mad.

Then I took the more constructive step of examining my annoyance. The reason behind it was the expectations I had of my digital content. To the extent I thought of it at all, I had no expectations that I would be able to make indefinite loans and still be able to read the book, but I certainly expected my ebook to be able to perform the proverbial walk-and-chew-gum trick. It turns out I expected much more from my digital content than Amazon and book publishers are willing to give.

On to the hilarious Web content, provided by the always reliably funny Oatmeal. In his comic “I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened,” Matthew Inman tells the story of a Game of Thrones fan who, having just finished reading the book, wants to see the TV show as soon as possible. Unfortunately for our fantasy fan, the series isn’t available on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime or Hulu. Throughout his search, the fan has a devil on his left shoulder urging him to just download the series through BitTorrent, while an angel on his right shoulder urges restraint. In the end, frustrated by his inability to find the series anywhere else online, our fan downloads it via BitTorrent in just a few minutes; by this point even the angel is on board. Once again, the expectations of a digital content consumer–even if it’s just a cartoon consumer–were dashed by its providers.

Those of us with access to high-speed Internet in one way or another have come to expect a certain level of flexibility with our digital content that providers are often loathe to provide. Digital content delivery services that have sprung mostly from outside the traditional mass entertainment industries, such as iTunes or Netflix, have done a decent job of giving customers some flexibility at a reasonable price, but clearly they have a long way to go to meet their expectations. Customers expect not just instant access to content, but also greater flexibility in how they use this content that they have paid for and rightfully own.

Regardless of how you feel about file sharing, the fact is that for the savvy user it does offer a level of flexibility that is currently unmatched by providers. Content providers that refuse to give customers the instantaneity and flexibility they want from their digital content only give them another excuse to run to the Pirate Bay for the latest season of Game of Thrones. Even the saintliest cartoon angel can’t resist that lure.

By Kilobug (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

In a study of the 2003 anti-Iraq War global protests, Bennet, Breunig, and Givens (2008) argue that changes in social identity processes are leading individuals to seek less binding and more flexible relationships with organizations that provide support on issues that matter to them personally. This model of activism stands in contrast to the 1960s-70s era model, in which concerned citizens identified strongly with one issue and organization.

Single-issue organizations are still being formed today, of course, but our relationships to them are becoming looser and less hierarchical. Bennett and colleagues argue that these loose ties, along with a heavy reliance on online media for political information, account for the speed with which anti-war activists were able to organize back in 2003. It’s likely that these massive, multi-nation gatherings could not have been organized with the same speed and degree of coordination without the information technologies we have at our disposal today.

The Internet and other communication technologies have also expanded greatly the repertoire of actions available to activists. Van Laer and Van Aelst (2010) have developed a useful typology of the repertoire available to today’s activists, which they divide between traditional activities—now supported by the Internet—and online-only activities.

One of the reasons this typology is useful is its classification of certain Internet-only activities as “high-threshold,” on a par with traditional activities such as sit-ins or demonstrations. Too often, Internet-only activities get lumped together under the derisive labels of “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” when in fact, in today’s wired world, there are plenty of high-risk, online-only tactics that activists can deploy.

Thus, information technologies have provided activists with a larger toolset, including online-only activities that have the potential to deliver as much political impact as their offline counterparts.

There are still, as ever, skeptics about the Internet’s impact on political participation and activism. In a widely-read New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell (2010) argued that high-risk (i.e., high-threshold) social protests like the anti-segregation lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s could never have been organized through social media sites like Twitter. Gladwell argues that social media-based activism revolves around weak ties, which are incompatible with high-threshold social protests like lunch counter sit-ins.

Gladwell’s article is problematic on several levels. First, as we have seen from the Bennet et al. article, there is empirical evidence that points to the possibility of  organizing high-threshold political protests based on weak ties. The 2003 anti-war protests were not organized according to the 1960s top-down, hierarchical model we associate with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) or similar groups.

Yet this loose global coalition managed to pour millions of anti-war protesters into the streets of London, Sydney and many American cities. Occupy Wall Street and the protests against the Tar Sands oil pipeline are other examples of high-threshold political activism facilitated to a great extent by social media and other communication technologies.

Second, the Gladwell piece is problematic because it sets up a false choice between face-to-face organizing and social media influence. As a former professional online organizer, I cannot think of one former colleague worth his or her salt who would seriously argue that the lunch counter sit-ins could have been organized exclusively through Twitter, had it been available at the time.

Most of them would say that Twitter is just one of many tools they use, both on- and offline, to mobilize as many people as possible behind their causes. It is probably not a stretch to say that civil rights organizers at the time availed themselves of every possible communication and organizational technology available at the time—from telephone to telegrams to television—to mobilize as many people as possible behind their cause as well.

Gladwell’s piece does raise an interesting question, however: what is the longevity of these newer social movements that are based on loose ties? The civil rights movement Gladwell talks about took many years to succeed. Do the newer social movements being forged in the Internet era have the same stamina?

Despite the fact that the Web turned 20 in August, Internet-assisted and Internet-only activism are still young. We are still navigating the tricky waters of the information age, including how to harness the power of technology to bring about social and political change. Perhaps in 50 years, the next Malcolm Gladwell will write an article on how his or her generation can never hope to achieve the type of social change we achieved thanks to Twitter. We should keep an eye out for that piece.

Read more:

Bennet, W. L., Breunig, C., & Givens, T. (2008). Communication and Political Mobilization: Digital Media and the Organization of Anti-Iraq War Demonstrations in the U.S. Political Communication, 25(3), 269-289.

Gladwell, M. (2010). Small Change. The New Yorker, 86, 42.

Van Laer, J., & Van Aelst, P. (2010). Internet and Social Movement Action Repertoires: Opportunities and Limitations. Information Communication & Society, 13(8), 1146-1171.

By David Shankbone (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)

A communication-centered explanation of the difficulty to reform Wall Street so far would depend largely on which view of public opinion and the nature of the public sphere (indeed, which view of democracy) you adopt.  University of Pennsylvania Provost and communication researcher Vincent Price (2008) usefully describes four models of the public sphere that could potentially apply to the U.S. at various points in the debate over financial reform and other issues:

The Competitive Elitism model: Under this model, the participation of citizens is limited to expressing their opinion through the ballot box. Otherwise, public opinion and decision-making is left to policy-makers, bureaucrats, experts and other elites. Public opinion becomes a matter of elites trying to convince each other of the rightness of their policy positions. As Walter Lippmann (1922) argued, the role of experts under this model is to explain complex issues to decision-makers and to manufacture consent from the public.

The Neo-pluralist model: This model emphasizes the role of intermediary interest groups such as labor unions and advocacy groups, as well as “issue publics”—smaller segments of the population that have a much higher level of interest and policy expertise on particular issues. These “issue publics” guide the opinions of others when these issues are debated, thus creating a “division of labor” among the population that keeps decision-making relatively anchored to popular wishes.

The Participatory model: This model emphasizes vigorous citizen participation, discussion and engagement in the public sphere. Drawing heavily from Jürgen Habermas’ work on the notion of the public sphere, this model argues that mass media and public opinion polls lull the citizenry into treating politics as a spectator sport, and that the antidote lies in providing spaces for citizens to discuss public issues, come to consensus through those discussions, and to express their preferences in a manner that has weight in policy decisions.

The Legal/neoliberal model: This view amounts to a form of libertarianism that sees state efforts to alleviate social inequalities as inevitably coercive and likely to curtail individual liberty. To varying degrees, this view has become widespread in the U.S., as evidenced by the wave of financial deregulation we have experienced for the past 30 years and in other more subtle ways too, such as the frequent use of the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor to describe public debate.

Public opinion as reason versus social control. Another view of public opinion that can inform the Wall Street reform debate is Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman’s (1995) comparison of public opinion as rationality vs. public opinion as social control. Noelle-Neuman argues that public opinion is not best understood as the conscious acquisition of knowledge through reason and the advancement of rationally sound judgments (except perhaps among elites).   Rather, she argues that public opinion is best understood as a coercive phenomenon that promotes social integration and insures that there is a sufficient level of consensus on which actions and decisions may be based.

Some combination of these models affords us the best chance to understand the failure to reform Wall Street to date, as well as the current potential to do so. Until the financial crisis hit in 2008, the issue public dedicated to financial reform was relatively small, leaving the public opinion field open for a competitive elitism model to play out relatively unencumbered by countervailing pressures. In this climate, a neoliberal view (sometimes called the “Washington Consensus”) became the “common sense” position, creating something akin to Noelle-Neuman’s “spiral of silence” in which to voice opposing viewpoints risked social and political alienation, especially among elites.

The financial crisis, however, has opened a space for other models of public opinion to operate as pathways to political change. As evidenced by the passage of President Obama’s financial reform bill and the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, the financial reform issue public increased in size. The Washington Consensus forged during the 90’s under a competitive elitism model is on the defensive—indeed, the whole notion of elite expertise is reeling. We are seeing a confluence between what public opinion polls (the traditional measure of “rational” public opinion) say about where the public stands on financial reform, and expressions by the issue public in the form of political protest.

In short, Noelle-Neuman’s conceptualization of public opinion as a coercive force is beginning to spiral in the other direction: unlike during the 90’s and early 2000’s, to voice support for a neo-liberal, hands-off approach to public affairs carries increasing risk of political and social alienation. The lag between the onset of the crisis in 2008 and the emergence of Occupy Wall Street today may be due to Barack Obama’s election, which delayed more overt expressions of public outrage for a while, but the gap between America and the rest of the world in that regard seems to be narrowing considerably.

As the economist Jeffrey Sach’s argues in his recent book “The Price of Civilization,” Obama might be more accurately seen as a transitional president rather than a transformational one.

It may be that during the comparatively good economic times of the 80’s and 90’s, models of public opinion that required little from the public more accurately applied to decision-making on financial reform and regulation, but because of the economic crisis, models that emphasize public involvement and the coercive force of public opinion are now more applicable.  This change in how public opinion translates into social change and governance may afford advocates of financial reform an opening they otherwise would not have had. The Occupy Wall Street movement is the most visible indication to date of their determination to take advantage of this opening.

Read more:

Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan.

Noelle-Neumann, E. (1995). Public opinion and Rationality. In T. L. Glasser & C. T. Salmon (Eds.), Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent (pp. 33–54). New York: Guilford Press.

Price, V. (2008). The Public and Public Opinion in Political Theories. In W. Donsbach  & M. Traugott (Eds.), Sage Handbook of Public Opinion Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

This new White House initiative, called “We the People,” will allow citizens to create petitions online, gather support for them, and receive a guaranteed official response if they meet a certain threshold.  The initiative is about “giving Americans a direct line to the White House on the issues and concerns that matter most to them,” President Obama said in a statement.

Take a look below at the official White House YouTube explainer on the initiative and the overview excerpted from the official announcement.

Here’s how the White House describes the process:

STEP #1

Create or Sign a Petition

Anyone 13 or older can create or sign a petition on WhiteHouse.gov asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. To get started you’ll need to create an account and verify your email address. Start thinking about the issues that matter to you, what you would like the Obama Administration to do to address the important challenges facing our country, and who you’ll ask to join you.

STEP #2

Build Support and Gather Signatures

Creating or signing a petition is just the first step. It’s up to you to build support for a petition and gather even more signatures. Use email, Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth to tell your friends, family and coworkers about the petitions you care about.

STEP #3

The White House Reviews and Responds

If a petition meets the signature threshold, it will be reviewed by the Administration and an official response will be issued. And we’ll make sure that the petition is sent to the appropriate policy makers in the Administration.

The initial threshold to get a response from the Administration is 5,000 signatures. There seems to be wide agreement across the academic literature about the Internet’s power to enable greater political participation by expanding access to information, enabling discussion and facilitating grassroots political mobilization. But the question is whether this new White House initiative is about participation or about the potential to actually influence policy.

If it’s the former, “We the People” seems more like a formalization of a process that is already happening every day: citizens petitioning the government online, mostly through NGOs of various ideological stripes. The difference is that in this instance, the signatures are channeled directly through the White House, and there’s a guaranteed official response if the 5,000 signatures threshold is met. Aside from that, it seems like just another channel for online petitions.

However, the initiative dangles the promise of actual influence on policy, and on this ground there are more questions than self-evident answers. Will this new framework create the expectation that policy action will be taken if petitions reach a certain level of support? Or will it simply allow this or future administrations to keep conducting policy as before — including the already-existing vehicles for petitioning the government such as the federal rule making process — while claiming that everyone’s voice has been heard and accruing the political benefits of that claim?

Here’s a hypothetical: A conservative group launches a petition to repeal a rule that keeps the amount of mercury in our drinking water below a certain level. A green group launches a counter-petition supporting the rule — or if anything, demanding it be strengthened. The conservative petition gathers 100,000 signatures, while the green one gathers 50,000.

Can the conservative group reasonably expect the current administration to turn its back on its green allies because the conservative petition gathered 50,000 more signatures than the green one? And if they can’t, what has the whole exercise amounted to beyond one of “participation” in which everyone’s voice was “heard” but nothing in the policy outcome went differently than it otherwise would have absent “We the People”?

Since the question of online political impact, as opposed to simply participation, will be the focus of my research as a student in  American University’s doctoral program in Communication, this dichotomy of participation vs. impact as it relates to “We the People” is one I will be looking at closely and blogging about here.

“We the People” raises many other questions as well. Will the data collected through these petitions be publicly available, particularly to researchers? How will this initiative impact the economic models of companies like Care2 or Change.org that rely on petitions (some user-generated) for their email list-building businesses? How will NGOs change their strategies and tactics to take advantage of this new tool?

Since “We the People hasn’t even been launched yet, it’s natural that we have more questions than answers – but it’s never too early to be asking questions.