The dust has settled on the Kony 2012 campaign. What have we learned?

Am I still talking about Kony 2012?  Yes, and with good reason.  On April 20th, the campaign came to a close of sorts with Cover the Night, an effort to ”make Kony famous” by plastering “every city, on every block” with “posters, stickers and murals of Kony to pressure governments into hunting down the guerrilla leader.”  It was the last action of the original Kony 2012 campaign.

The Invisible Children site does not tell how many young people participated in Cover the Night (though I imagine they know).  The Guardian, however, which has given excellent and critical coverage to the campaign, noted that:

The movement’s phenomenal success in mobilising young people online, following last month’s launch of a 29-minute documentary which went viral, flopped in trying to turn that into real world actions. ….Paltry turnouts on Friday at locations across north America, Europe and Australia left cities largely unplastered and the movement’s credibility damaged. “What happened to all the fuss about Kony?” said one typical tweet. “Kony is so last month,” said another.

Although the campaign succeeded in increasing awareness of Kony and Western news coverage of Africa, and mobilized millions of youth to care (if briefly) about a humanitarian crisis on the other side of the world, it has so far failed in its own stated goal: the capture of Joseph Kony.

The standard discourse at this point would be to call Kony 2012 “slacktivism”:  a clear example of how massive online action (millions of video views and shares) converted into modest offline action (thousands not millions of participants in Cover the Night) and no impact (Kony is still at large), and then using that observation to disprove the value of digital activism in general.

Let’s not have that conversation (again).  Instead, let’s look at why the online action did not work.   Sandrine Perrot, a long-time specialist on Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army at France’s Sciences Po, has an excellent explanation on the site The Independent, here’s part of it:

In Congo or CAR [Central African Republic], making Kony famous by sharing the video, wearing a bracelet or sticking his poster in Western streets won’t bring any solution to the highly difficult operational terrain, to the weak coordination and raising tensions between the Ugandan, Congolese and Centrafrican militaries deployed since December 2008 (which the so far unfinanced joint UA/UN mission created on March 23rd will first have to smooth), or to the underlying strategic divisions between Washington, USAID, the State department and the defence department.

Kony 2012 has failed not because digital activism is inherently ineffective, but because their own strategy was.  As Perrot points out, the reasons that Kony has not been capture are diverse and complex, including factors from difficult topography to the challenges multilateralism.  Invisible Children’s theory of change - that mobilizing Western young people to increase Western awareness of the crisis would change that complex dynamic – was inaccurate.  The arrest of the video’s creator, Jason Russell, while ranting and publicly naked, and the harsh criticism on the original video’s simplifications and misrepresentations did not help matters. This is how all digital activism failures (and successes) should be evaluated: by looking at the range of causal factors and placing the effect of the digital action in context.

Post-Arab Spring/Indignados/Occupy it is simply ignorant to argue that digital tools have no impact on political realities.   They do, but the recipe of success and failure is far from clear.  Scholars like Clay Shirky and David Faris argue that political outcomes have always been multi-causal and the introduction of digital tactics into these complex processes make them more complex, not less so.

In the case of Kony 2012 the political and logistical factors described by Perrot overwhelmed the effect of Invisible Children’s online and offline actions.    The organizers mismatched context and tactics, a difficult task in any campaign, especially one as international and intractable as the ongoing crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

This isn’t happening as much as it could. Why? I think it’s because of a few big challenges facing the field of support for digital advocates. First, there’s a lack of information from the ground about what is actually needed. Second, trainers are too often flown in from thousands of miles away for a few days of workshopping with no incentive to remain in contact with the advocates they trained. Third, remote training resources (like guides) often sit on the web without reaching those who might be able to benefit from them.

Part of why we founded the engine room was to address these challenges. Our first project, the Social Tech Census, aims to map the best resources for integrating digital media into advocacy work in order to inform the work of the communities of practice that we work with: advocates, support organizations and technologists. The Census is an important foundational step for us and (if all goes according to plan) will also be a useful tool for our partners.

But how, exactly, will it be useful for them? We decided to ask, and here’s what we found out. There are four main ways that groups we partner with will be able to act on the information that we’re gathering.

1. New program ideas based on empirical evidence for who needs what and where

Any attempt to compile an exhaustive database of resources will ideally end up spotlighting gaps in what’s out there. We suspect this will be the case with regard to regions (where are all the francophone tech trainings on mapping tools?), issues (say, digital security versus strategy for online video) and types (ad hoc communities built on email lists or formal organizations) of support.

By shedding light on these gaps the Census should make it easier for our partners to better identify and understand demand in order to meet it. Here’s an example: say WITNESS is writing a proposal for a training program in a region that they’ve never worked in before. They could use the Census to identify and include hard data about the relevant training gaps in order to underline the importance of the proposed program.

2. Adapting existing training programs to on-the-ground contexts

The first step in launching any capacity building program (technology-focused or otherwise) is often to identify local stakeholders. You need these networks to engage with the most nuts and bolts aspects of your training effort (for example, identifying the right participants). This process is both time consuming and expensive. The Census aims to allow trainers to identify local actors – and get necessary information from the ground in order to maximize the impact of their projects. New Tactics in Human Rights, for example, could use it to connect on the ground trainers with people who are already there providing support – helping both to maximize their impact.

3. Getting resources for remote learning into the right hands

A lot of our partners have put quite a bit of very laudable effort into creating resources for remote learning so that they can help more people to become effective digital advocates. Take WITNESS’ Video Advocacy Toolkit, Access’ guide to addressing DDoS attacks or the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self Defense project. If they’re going to have as much impact as possible, these resources need to get into the hands of those who need them most. Partners should be able to use the Census to identify outreach partners who clearly understand information needs in target communities.

4. Working together to enhance the current model by which advocates get tech support

Will the the Census minimize the degree to which trainers have to be parachuted into new contexts in the first place? We hope so. The best thing we heard from one of our partners was that they didn’t want to fly across the world to give a training (or send one of their staff). They’d rather use the Census to connect local need to local support.

Do you work with an international organization or network that supports technology use in advocacy? We’d love to get your opinions- take this survey- it only takes 5 minutes.

Image from infographic on IHub Nairobi (startupafrica.com)

However, some people, like the folks at Sortable who created the graphic below, are trying to reclaim the term.  A slacktivist isn’t an ineffective armchair activist.  Slacktivism can “build awareness of an issue overnight.” Slacktivists are more likely to donate $ and volunteer (offline, I assume).

Is slacktivism a term that should be reclaimed or is it too “naïve and condescending… misinformed and misleading”, too toxic to use?

This post proposes a new way of thinking about the integration of digital and physical activism.  Below is a chart that moves through the steps for implementing a single tactic. (You can click the image to see it enlarged.) Activists can (and do) mix digital and physical tactics according to which is best suited to their needs at any given moment. I’ve called it a “choice matrix” because at each point the activist has a choice of whether to act in physical space, digital space, or a combination of the two. Let’s move through through the process:

Whenever digital technology is used for any activist purpose, the digital context matters: what technologies do citizens have access to and what apps do they use (or know how to use)? How free is their ability to both access and disseminate information?

These digital contextual factors are part of the overall context in which the tactic is carried out, including many macro factors in physical space, like the nation’s political system, economics, and demographics. All these contextual factors will help activists decide which tactic to implement and will determine the success of that tactic.

Once the they move into the planning phase, activists have the option of working in digital or physical space and likely work in both.  They will use email to coordinate a face-to-face meeting.  They will use chat or Skype to meet if meeting offline is dangerous or impossible (for example, if the organizers are in different countries).

Mobilization is also likely to be carried out in both digital and physical space (what Tufekci calls the “world of bits” and the “world of atoms”).  They can disseminate the call to action on their blog or Facebook page.  Supporters can send SMS to their friends.  Though the message will move more slowly, spreading a call to action via face-to-face encounters can also occur.

The action may be digital or physical.  Fully digital actions include a DDoS (hacker) attacks or e-petition.  Offline actions include protest rallies or holding a strike. An offline action can be mobilized digitally, and vice-versa.  A protest rally can be mobilized quickly via SMS (and is called a flash mob).  You can learn about an e-petition while talking to a friend in a coffee-shop. (More tactics here: tinyurl.com/CivilResistance20)

Hybrid actions are also possible.  Unlike an e-petition or a rally, hybrid actions require both digital and physical space to be carried out.  One example of hybrid action is a letter-writing campaign in which letters are submitted by supporters via a website, then printed out and hand-delivered to an elected official in paper form.

Once the action has taken place, the tactic is not over.  Perception is extremely important to whether an action will succeed or fail.   This is where amplification comes in.  As in the mobilization stage, digital tools are used to broadcast information.  However, in this phase the information is different: the content is documentation of the action itself rather than a call to action.

While the action can be amplified online or offline, more and more we are seeing hybrid amplification: a citizen takes a video or photo digitally and then sends it to a TV station or newspaper for traditional broadcast.  This is how all of Al Jazeera’s footage of the Tunisian Revolution was collected for broadcast in 2011 since its journalists were forbidden from entering the country.

The only place where I see a real divergence in the importance of digital and physical space is at the stage impact.  So far as I can tell, impact only occurs in physical space.  Whether the action succeeds or fails to influence  citizens (ex: a safe sex campaign), government (ex: a campaign for or against a law) or private institution (ex: an ant-corporate campaign), those impacts are all felt offline.  This is because there are no individuals or institutions that exist only in the digital space.  Not yet, at least.

Along with The Global Digital Activism Data Set, Essential Readings in Digital Activism, and Digital Activism Decoded, MAP is coming to define itself by digital production, flexible human resources through porous collaboration, embracing the economics of abundance, and producing information that is free (in more ways than one).

Digital Production:  Our products don’t exist in the world of atoms, they exist in the world of bits.  Everything we have created – Civil Resistance 2.0, the  Global Digital Activism Data Set, the Essential Readings in Digital Activism resources list, and the book Digital Activism Decoded – exist in digital form.  In fact, only the last product exists in physical form.  We’re creating products, but we create them only in cyberspace. This saves money and allows for a wide audience.

Flexible Human Resources through Porous Collaboration:  Civil Resistance 2.0 is crowdsourced.  Anyone can edit the list of methods, which exists as a Google Spreadsheet with no editing or privacy restrictions.  For the Global Digital Activism Data Set, we collaborated with Christopher Bail of UNC Chapel Hill, who donated his research assistants’ time to help us code a large tranche of our digital activism case studies.  In this way we shared the cost of coding without creating any bureaucratic overhead.

This is the kind of easy and porous collaboration championed by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine in their book The Networked Nonprofit.  It also relies on the talent of brilliant volunteers through mechanisms described by Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus.  The motivation is to leverage passion, talent, and financial resources across a range of institutions and individuals to create the best products at the lowest cost.  If we had to pay all the experts and PhD’s that contribute to creating our products, our budget would be at least a few hundred thousand dollars.  As it is we pay a small fraction of that, mostly for student labor to code data.

Embracing the Economics of Abundance:  As our openness statement declares, we are committed to making our research processes and research products open to the public.  But it goes beyond openness.  We embrace the economics of abundance on the production side by leveraging the spare time of passionate and brilliant people.  We embrace the economics of abundance on the distribution side by creating digital products, of which infinite copies can be made for free.  These are the kinds of  non-market economics principles discussed in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.

Information Should be Free… and Free: Open source evangelist Richard Stallman made the distinction that his software was free as in freedom, not as in free beer.  We believe that information should be free in both ways:  it should be legally unrestricted (everything we produce is under a Creative Commons license) but should also be cost-free to the user.  Be believe that the information we are distributing about digital activism is important and as such we want it to be accessible to as many people as possible.  (I’d imagine most people in intellectual endeavors are of this opinion.)  Free digital products help us achieve these goals.

Our goal at the Meta-Activism Project is to innovate on three levels:  as an organization, in our research methods, and in the results of that research.  We want to study the new phenomenon of digital activism in a new way, and be a new type of organization while doing it.

While Sharp’s 198 are still as relevant today as they were some 40 years ago, the technology space has changed radically. In Sharp’s “Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts” published in 2012, Gene writes that “a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.” About four years ago, I began to think about how technology could extend Sharp’s methods and possibly generate entirely new methods as well. This blog post was my first attempt at thinking this through and while it was my intention to develop the ideas further for my dissertation, my academic focus shifted somewhat.

With the PhD out of the way, my colleague Mary Joyce suggested we launch a research project to explore how Sharp’s methods can and are being extended as a result of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The time was ripe for this kind of research so we spent the past few months building a database of civil resistance methods 2.0 based on Sharp’s original list. We also consulted a number of experts in the field to help us populate this online database. We decided not to restrict the focus of this research  to ICTs only–i.e., any type of technology qualifies, such as drones, for example.

This database (http://tinyurl.com/CivRes20) will be an ongoing initiative and certainly a live document since we’ll be crowdsourcing further input. In laying the foundations for this database, we’ve realized once again just how important creativity is when thinking about civil resistance. Advances in technology and increasing access to technology provides fertile ground for the kind of creativity that is key to making civil resistance successful.

We invite you to contribute your creativity to this database and share the link (tinyURL.com/CivRes20 or tinyurl.com/CivilResistance20) widely with your own networks. We’ve added some content, but there is still a long way to go. Please share any clever uses of technology that you’ve come across that have or could be applied to civil resistance by adding them.

Our goal is to provide activists with a go-to resource where they can browse through lists of technology-assisted methods to inform their own efforts. In the future, we envision taking the database a step further by considering what sequencing of said methods are most effective.

"slacktivism" vs. "world-changing": the truth is in between

MYTH: It’s a Twitter Revolution! Digital tools make all the difference.

MYTH: It’s just slacktivism! Digital tools don’t matter at all.

FACT: Online tactics are closely integrated with offline tactics and context.

FACT: The story of impact is the story of that integration.

_____

Winners and losers, all or nothing, zero-sum games: maybe it’s a sign of the times, but people seems to want to put digital activism into a corner.  Even sophisticated digital practitioners (like the COO of DoSomething.org, pictured above) want to assign digital activism an extreme value: either it is “changing the world” or it is “slacktivism with no purpose.” The reality, however, is more complex.

The “Twitter Revolution” vs. “slacktivism” debate has been argued since before the Arab Spring. Yet both of these perspectives are inaccurate. “Was it online or offline?… That is absolutely the wrong question,”  argued UNC Chapel Hill sociologist Zeynep Tukekci recently. Online and offline worlds are not separate. “The reality is obviously… it’s integrated.”

When activists organize an offline protest through email and Facebook or tweet an image of offline police abuse or meet offline to design a digital video, it is misguided to argue that half of these actions didn’t matter. When digital tactics are used, they are often closely integrated with offline tactics and always exist within an offline political, economic, and social context.

Understanding the effect of digital tactics on activism outcomes means understanding how digital factors balance against other causal factors.  Digital tactics are one causal factor among many and all complex political outcomes are multi-causal. Notes Clay Shirky, “the ‘It’s not a cause’ argument [against digital activism] cuts both (all) ways. Economics, legal frameworks, youth bulges, etc… are all factors.” Digital is just one more causal factor that we need to add to our analysis.

Digital activism narratives that ignore the role of either online or offline factors are unlikely to be accurate. Rather than picking a narrative of digital revolution or digital slacktivism and then building a story around that this misleading narrative, we should seek to tell the story of integration:  How are both online and offline tactics and tools being used to achieve activists’ goals? What is the offline (political, economic, social) context of a digital tactic and how does that explain its success or failure?

Marche begins with the premise that we are getting lonelier – that more adults express feelings of isolation, and that the number of American households containing only one person has grown enormously. What follows though, is a classic piece of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning — despite the fact that these secular trends have been in the data for two decades, he somehow manages to blame this outbreak of loneliness on social media, and focuses almost exclusively on Facebook. What is most galling about this premise is that some of the data he cites actually predate the existence of Facebook. One unnamed survey cites a decrease in the average size of our networks of personal confidants from 2.94 to 2.08 from 1985 to 2004. Quick question: When was Facebook invented?

Why is this kind of failed activism acceptable?

In the summer of 2009 the eyes of the world were on Iran, where citizens poured out into the streets of Tehran to protest a corrupt election.  Solidarity rallies were held around the world, from Paris to London to Los Angeles to Melbourne.  People showed solidarity on the web as well by changing their Twitter avatars or tinting them green, the color of Islam and of the protesters.

In the end, neither solidarity action had much effect. The Iranian government brutally detained, tortured, and killed their own citizens.  Out of fear, the people of Iran went back home and Mahmud Ahmadinejad remained president.

While few condemned the street protesters for their lack of effect, many branded the online solidarity action as “slacktivism.” Perhaps it was useful for raising awareness or showing the Iranian government that the world was watching, but it was still the absolute minimum that one could do.

...but this isn't?

While both online and offline solidarity actions were ineffective, only the online one broadly was criticized.  While both online and offline actions showed international solidarity and both failed to protect Iranian citizens, the failure of the offline rallies were morally acceptable while the failure of the digital action was not.  Why?

Here at the beginning of the digital age we are suffering from a functional gap between the scope of our compassion and the scope of our action.  We know more about the rest of the world than we ever did before, both because we share an unprecedented global communication network (the World Wide Web) and because social media allwos us to self-broadcast across that network.  We knew what was happening in Iran because Iranians were tweeting at us.  We changed our icons because that was where our Iranian interlocutors were, where they could “see” us. It was less a political act than an emotional act, an act of empathy and compassion.

But our political and civil society institutions have not evolved to match this increased capacity for awareness and compassion.  Even though millions of people in the US (and around the world) decided that catching Joseph Kony was a goal that mattered to them, there was little that those people (or even resource-rich governments and international NGOs) could do to make it happen. We have a new compassion gap in that our compassion is greater than our capacity to act on that compassion.

We perceive offline protest as legitimate – even when it fails – because it has been historically linked to effective outcomes.  Digital activism is much newer, and its track record is more mixed, partly because of this gap between digital awareness and institutional response.  Because of digital awareness we are failing at more ambitious and more global social change goals, but all skeptics see is the failure.

But this can change.  We are at the beginning of a new age of digital politics and I believe we will develop new methods of action to match the increased scope of our awareness and compassion.

[UPDATED] Slacktivism is a widely used term for acts of supposed activism that are actually lazy and ineffective. Yet in the digital realm this term is problematic, and should be replaced with less derogatory terms like “micro-activism,” “online action” or “digital action”.  Here’s why:

1) Digital technology is more likely to activate the politically inactive than to deactivate the political active.

"Slacktivism" implies that small online actions are pointless, but this is not true.

Slacktivism conveys the image of the lazy activist, a politically active person who decides to sign an e-petition rather than attend a street rally.  Though it is indeed easier to join a Facebook group or make an online donation than to canvass door-to-door or participate in a sit-in, this choice rarely occurs in the real world.  The politically active will be active both online and offline. They have found a new realm for their action. The politically inactive would never have canvassed or participated in a sit-in in the first place.

In a recent paper, “Political activities on the Internet : Slacktivism or political participation by other means?”, Henrik Serup Christensen reviewed the literature on slacktivism and found that “there is no evidence of the substitution thesis” that taking action online will make people less likely to take action online.  “In fact,” noted blogger Luke Allnut, Christensen “concludes that the Internet has a positive effect on offline mobilization.”

Small digital options, such as “liking” a Facebook cause or re-tweeting a political slogan, are unlikely to make activists less active.  However, they do provide provide a low bar to participation that makes it easier than ever for the politically inactive to take that first step into engagement.  Says Tufekci, “Since these so-called ‘slacktivists’ were never activists to begin with, they are not in dereliction of their activist duties.” Everyone needs to start somewhere, and we should not diminish those first tentative steps into 21st-century citizenship.

2) Small acts of digital activism are helpful to online organizers.

According to Amy Sample Ward, Membership Director for the Nonprofit Technology Network, micro-actions, such as liking a Facebook post, show organizers two things: “First, that your supporters are listening and paying attention…. Second, that supporters are standing by to take the action you promote.”  These small actions help people self-identify as supporters of a cause who are open to being mobilized for further action.

3) Derogatory terms like slacktivism discourage these first-timers.

However, if journalists identify these small actions as meaningless, the politically inactive may instead be discouraged from taking even a small step into political action.  By not engaging they will cut off one easy entry point into political participation and deprive online organizers of a means of identifying new supporters.

4) Change has always happened through a “ladder of engagement.”
Now we have a new first rung.

As the previous points have implied, no one is arguing that liking a post or re-tweeting a slogan will lead directly to massive political change.  This is not new to the digital age.  Great change has always occurred through a “ladder of engagement” where more and more people are encouraged by organizers or by their peers to take more and more dramatic and disruptive action in pursuit of their goal.

The difference now is that we now have a new digital rung on the ladder of engagement that is easier to grab hold of than most offline alternative.  Now it’s easier than ever to take that first step into participation.  According to Tufekci, “today’s ‘meaningless click’ is actually a form of symbolic action which may form the basis of tomorrow’s other kind of action.”

5) Slacktivism implies that the action is ineffective, yet we often don’t know the ultimate outcome until long after the action has occurred.

In June of 2010 an innocent young Egyptian man named Khaled Said was brutally beaten to death by police.  A few days later a young Google executive named Wael Ghonim started a Facebook group called “We Are All Khaled Said.”  Within a few months it had grown to over 400,000 members and was the biggest dissident Facebook page in Egypt.

At the time many would have called membership in the group slacktivism.  Why not go out in the streets?  Why not protest?  All in good time.  The group became a community which intensified anti-regime feeling.  According to Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Prior to the murder of Khaled Said, there were blogs and YouTube videos that existed about police torture, but there wasn’t a strong community around them.  This case changed that.”

When the Tunisian revolution began in December of 2010, the Khaled Said group became a mobilizing structure in which calls for change could be made and protests could be mobilized.  Its founder, Wael Ghonim, became an important rallying figure during the revolution, encouraging protesters to stay in the streets despite regime violence.  It was but one of many factors in the fall of Mubarak, but certainly not slacktivism.

Not every Facebook group will become We are All Khaled Said.  In fact, most won’t. But it is best to reserve judgement until the final outcome is evident, rather than discourage a new form of political participation, the effects of which we are just beginning to understand.