What Does a Wasp Have To Do With Civil Resistance? Everything.

Google’s Vint Cerf recommended Eric Russell’s science fiction novel, Wasp, to a colleague of mine in the field of civil resistance. I’m very glad he did, I just read it and the novel is brilliant. It was published in 1957 and weaves civil resistance theory with creative tactics that remain fully applicable half-a-century later. Plus, it’s an action-packed page-turner. I highly recommend it.

What I want to do here is share some excerpts that elegantly highlight the theory behind civil resistance (my next posts expose creative tactics using stickers and paper-based wars).

The setting is an intergalactic war between Earth and the Sirian Empire. The latter has an advantage in personnel and equipment. Earth needs an edge and this is where James Mowry comes in. He is covertly dropped on the Sirian home planet to destabilize the entire empire. The aim is to divert the Empire’s resources and focus away from the war against Earth by creating a fictitious resistance movement at home. Wasp is the story of the strategies, creative tactics and real-world technologies that Mowry employs to accomplish his mission.

But first he has to be convinced to take on a mission that would have him single-handedly destabilize the entire empire from within. Naturally, he seriously questions the sanity of Agent Wolf, the unpleasant operator assigned to recruit him. Growing impatient with Mowry’s stubbornness, Wolf hands him some press reports.

Mowry glanced at them and perused them slowly.

The first told of a prankster in Roumania. This fellow had done nothing more than stand in the road and gaze fascinatedly at the sky, occasionally crying, ‘Blue flames!’ Curious people had joined him and gaped likewise. The group became a crowd; the crowd became a mob.

Soon the audience blocked the street and overflowed into the side streets. Police tried to break it up, making matters worse. Some fool summoned the fire squads. Hysterics on the fringes swore they could see, or had seen, something weird above the clouds. Reporters and cameramen rushed to scene; rumours raced around. The government sent up the air force for a closer look and panic spread over an area of two hundred square, from which the original cause had judiciously disappeared.

‘Amusing if nothing else,’ Mowry remarked. ‘Read on,’ commanded Wolf.

The second report concerned a daring escape from jail. Two notorious killers had stolen a car; they made six hundred miles before recapture, fourteen hours later. The third report detailed an automobile accident: three killed, one seriously injured, the car a complete wreck. The sole survivor died nine hours later.

Mowry handed back the papers. ‘What’s all this to me?’

Wolf: We’ll take those reports in order as read. They prove something of which we’ve been long aware but which you may not have realized. Now, let’s take the first one. That Roumanian did nothing, positively nothing, except stare at the sky and mumble. Yet he forced a government to start jumping around like fleas on a hot griddle. It shows that in given conditions, actions and reaction can be ridiculously out of proportion. By doing insignificant things in suitable circumstances, one can obtain results monstrously in excel of the effort.

Now consider the two convicts. They didn’t do much, either. They climbed a wall, seized a car, drove like made until they gas ran out, then got caught. But for the better part of fourteen hours, they monopolized the attention of six planes, ten helicopters, one hundred and twenty patrol-cars. They tied up eighteen telephone exchanges, uncountable phone lines and radio link-ups, not to mention police, deputies, posses of volunteers, hunters, trackers, forest rangers and National Guardsmen. The total was twenty-thousand, scattered over three states.

Finally, lets consider this auto smash-up. The survivor was able to tell us the cause before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and was buzzing around his face. The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being, the waps’s size is minute, it’s strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid. In this instance, the wasp didn’t even use it. Nevertheless, that wasp killed four big men and converted a larger, powerful car into a heap of scarp.

‘I see the point,” Mowry said, “but where do I come in?’

“Right here,” said Wolf. “We want you to become a wasp.”

After several months of training, Mowry is dropped on Pertane, the home planet of the Sirian Empire. He spends the first evening exploring Jaimec, the capital.

He wandered around, memorizing all geographical features that might prove useful to recall later on. But primarily he was seeking to estimate the climate of public opinion with particular reference to minority opinions.

In every war, he knew, no matter how great a government’s power, it’s rule is never absolute. In every war, no matter how righteous the cause, the effort is never total. No campaign has ever been fought with the leadership united in favour of it and with the rank and file one hundred per cent behind them.

There is always the minority that opposes a war for such reasons as reluctance to make necessary sacrifices, fear of personal loss or suffering, or philosophical and ethical objection to warfare as a method of settling disputes. Then there is a lack of confidence in the ability of the leadership; resentment at being called upon to play a subordinate role; pessimistic belief that victory is far from certain and defeat very possible; egoistic satisfaction of refusing to run with the herd; psychological opposition to being yelled at on any and every pretext, and a thousand and one other reasons.

No political or military dictatorship ever has been one hundred per cent successful in identifying and suppressing the malcontents, who bid their time. Mowry could be sure that, by the law of averages, Jaimec must have its share of these.

For a description of the creative tactics used by Mowry, stay tuned for my following post.

Patrick Philippe Meier

Disaster Theory for Techies

I’ve had a number of conversations over the past few weeks on the delineation between pre- and post-disaster phases. We need to move away from this linear concept of disasters, and conflicts as well for that matter. So here’s a quick introduction to “disaster theory” that goes beyond what you’ll find in the mainstream, more orthodox literature.

What is a Disaster?

There is a subtle but fundamental difference between disasters (processes) and hazards (events); a distinction that Jean-Jacques Rousseau first articulated in 1755 when Portugal was shaken by an earthquake. In a letter to Voltaire one year later, Rousseau notes that, “nature had not built  [process] the houses which collapsed and suggested that Lisbon’s high population density [process] contributed to the toll” (1).

(Incidentally, the earthquake in Portugal triggered extensive earthquake research in Europe and also served as the focus for various publications, ranging from Kant’s essays about the causes of earthquakes to Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne).

In other words, natural events are hazards and exogenous while disasters are the result of endogenous social processes. As Rousseau added in his note to Voltaire, “an earthquake occurring in wilderness would not be important to society” (2). That is, a hazard need not turn to disaster since the latter is strictly a product of social processes.

And so, while disasters were traditionally perceived as “sudden and short lived events, there is now a tendency to look upon disasters in African countries in particular, as continuous processes of gradual deterioration and growing vulnerability,” which has important “implications on the way the response to disasters ought to be made” (3).

But before we turn to the issue of response, what does the important distinction between events and processes mean for early warning?

Blast From the Past

In The Poverty of Historicism (1944), the German Philosopher Karl Popper makes a distinction between two kinds of predictions: “We may predict (a) the coming of a typhoon [event], a prediction which may be of the greatest practical value because it may enable people to take shelter in time; but we may also predict (b) that if a certain shelter is to stand up to a typhoon, it must be constructed [process] in a certain way […].”

A typhoon, like an  earthquake, is certainly a hazard, but it need not lead to disaster if shelters are appropriately built since this process culminates in minimizing social vulnerability.

In contemporary disaster research, “it is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and  dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus” (4).

In other words, the term “natural disaster” is an oxymoron and “phrases such as a ‘disaster hit the city,’ ‘tornadoes kill and destroy,’ or a ‘catastrophe is known by its works’ are, in the last resort, animistic thinking” (5).

The vulnerability or resilience of a given system is not simply dependent on the outcome of future events since vulnerability is the complex product of past political, economic and social processes. When hazards such as landslides interface with social systems the risk of disasters may increase. “The role of vulnerability as a causal factor in disaster losses tends to be less well understood, however. The idea that disasters can be managed by identifying and managing specific risk factors is only recently becoming widely recognized” (6).

A Complex System

Consider an hourglass or sand clock as an illustration of vulnerability-as-causality. Grains of sand sifting through the narrowest point of the hourglass represent individual events or natural hazards. Over time a sand pile starts to form, which represents the evolution of society or the connectedness of a social network. Occasionally, a grain of sand falls on the pile and an avalanche or disaster follows.

Why does the avalanche occur? One might ascribe the cause of the avalanche to one grain of sand, i.e., a single event. On the other hand, a systems approach to vulnerability analysis would associate the avalanche with the pile’s increasing slope and to the connectedness (or population density) of the grains constituting the pile since these factors render the structure increasingly vulnerable to falling grains.

Left on its own, the sand pile’s stability, or the social network, becomes increasingly critical or vulnerable. From this perspective, “all disasters are slow onset when realistically and locally related to conditions of susceptibility”. A hazard event might be rapid-onset, but the disaster, requiring much more than a hazard, is a long-term process, not a one-off event.

We must therefore “reduce as much as we can the force of the underlying tectonic stresses in order to lower the risk of synchronous failure—that is, of catastrophic collapse that cascades across boundaries between technological, social and ecological systems” (7).

Recall Rousseau’s comment on population density as a contributing cause of the earthquake disaster and Popper’s remark that adequate shelter or resilience could offset the impact of typhoons. The sand pile at the bottom of the hourglass is constrained by the glass’s circumference. While abstract, this image mimics the growth of densely populated cities that become increasingly vulnerable to hazards, either natural or technological.

Unlike the clock’s lifeless grains of sand, however, human beings can minimize their vulnerability to exogenous shocks through disaster preparedness, mitigation and adaptation. In doing so, individuals can “flatten” the structure of the sand pile into a less hierarchical system and thereby shift or diffuse the risk of an avalanche. In conflict prevention terms, this means structural prevention, which typically focuses on local livelihoods and local capacity building.

Implications

Clearly, early warning should seek to monitor both the falling grains and the vulnerability of the sand pile to determine the risk and magnitude of an avalanche. In more formalistic language, a dual approach is important because it is not always clear a priori whether a disaster is due to a strong exogenous shock, to the internal dynamics of the system or a combination of both (8).

As the disaster management community has learned, in “support[ing] good decision-making, the issue is not one of being able to predict the unpredictable. Rather, the fundamental question is that, given that we cannot have reliable predictions of future outcomes, how can we prevent excessive hazard levels today and in the future in a cost-effective manner?”

Patrick Philippe Meier

ISA 2009: Mobile Phones and Political Activism

The second presentation at the ISA panel that I’m chairing will feature research by Fabien Miard on mobile phones as facilitators of political activism (see previous post for first presentation). Fabien will be sharing the findings from his recent MA thesis (PDF), which I have read with great interest.

Introduction

Fabien’s research examines whether the number mobile phones affect political activity by drawing on a large-N quantitative study. This is an area in much need of empirical analysis since “little systematic research beyond loose collections of case studies has been done so far.” Furthermore, as I have noted in my own dissertation research, the vast majority of social science research on information and communication technologies (ICTs) is focused on the impact of the Internet exclusively.

Data

The large-N study draws on the proprietary Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive (CNTS) for data on three forms of political activism: anti-government demonstrations, riots and major government crises. This dataset is derived from articles published in the New York Times (NYT). The data on the number of mobile phone subscribers is provided by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Control variables include: GDP per capita and population. The data he used spanned 191 countries between 1991-2006 but “a third of these dropped out due to missing values.”

Analysis

Fabien uses negative binomial regression (with one year time lag) to test whether the number of mobile phone subscribers is a statistically significant predictor of political activism.

The results indicate that mobile density has no significant effect on anti-government demonstrations when the control variables are included. The same is true when using riots or major government crises as dependent variables. GDP per capita is small and insignificant except for riots, where it has a significant negative effect. Population has an effect on all three variants of political activism variables.

Conclusion

Fabien therefore concludes that mobile connectivity is neither negatively nor positively associated with political activism. This implies that existing case studies “are overrated and that generalization by means of a global comparative case study is not possible.” He suggests that future quantitative research  take into account the following two recommendations:

• Compare the impact of mobile phones on democratic versus oppressive regimes;
• Analyze the combined impact of mobile phones and the Internet in addition to traditional technology variables;

These suggestions are spot on. One large-N quantitative study that I recently co-authored at the Berkman Center takes the first recommendation into account by comparing the impact of Internet and mobile phone users on measures of governance and democracy in both democratic and autocratic regimes (stay tuned for a blog post on this).

In my own dissertation research, I plan to compare the impact of Internet and mobile phone users on protests frequency in highly repressive versus midly repressive regimes. I also take into account Fabien’s second recommendation by adding Internet users and landlines. Furthermore, I include unemployment rate as a control variable which Fabien omits in his analysis.

Patrick Philippe Meier

Greek Riots, Facebook, Twitter and SMS (Updated)

I am particularly interested in riots since part of my doctoral research focuses on the strategic and tactical uses of digital technology to organize, mobilize and coordinate protest events in repressive contexts. On this note, Alternet just published this piece by Andrew Lam on the “Greek Riots and the News Media in the Age of Twitter,” which echoes some of the issues raised during the panel discussion I participated in last week in  DC on the decline of foreign reporting and rise of citizen journalism.

The Greek riots are a classic case of iRevolutions in the making, i.e., individuals and networks (hyper) empowered by linking technologies like Facebook, Twitter and SMS. What follows first are my thoughts on the two main points that the Andrew highlights in his piece. The second part of this post sheds light on the dynamics of riots by drawing on complexity science and Clay Shirky’s work.

Initial Conditions: The riots were sparked after a 15-year old student “died from a gunshot wound in his heart, inflicted by a policeman following an altercation between a police patrol and a small group of youths in Athens” (1). Thousands of young people took to the streets after quickly spreading the news via Facebook, Twitter and SMS.

But as Andrew points out, no one bothered to verify or investigate the police officer’s claim that he was innocent: “When the coroner’s report came out several days later, it said the bullet was dented, meaning it ricocheted before hitting the teenager, but the information changed nothing. Athens had been burning for several nights, and the people, whose rage fueled the flames, couldn’t care less for facts.”

These valid points aside, my first question is what took the coroner so long? Extracting a bullet (pardon the morbidity) is not exactly brain surgery.  If said coroner had a mobile phone, s/he could have taken a picture of the dented bullet and shared it as widely as possible hoping that it would go viral. I have no idea how effective that would have been, but it’s a thought. The second question I have is whether any investigative journalists were pressing the coroner to get on with it?

Future Conditions: Andrew notes that “professional front line reporters may very well be on the way to being redundant in a world where, according to Reuters Director of News Media Development, Chris Cramer, ‘Every key event going forward will be covered by members of the public, and not by traditional journalists.’” (I just checked the Wikipedia page on the riots and it was edited close to 200 times within 48 hours of the shooting).

However, as I mentioned during last week’s panel, the mainstream media has an increasingly more important social service to play in the Twitter Age: distinguishing fact from fiction. Andrew is thus spot on when he writes that “the role of the mature news organization [...] is to filter real news from pseudo news, rather than treating all content as equal.”

Complexity Science: Power laws are a defining signature of complex systems. The Richter scale, which relates earthquake frequencies to magnitude, is probably the most well known power law. As we all know, there are many small tremors every day but only a few major earthquakes every century. As it happens, protests such as strikes also follow a power law distribution. See for example this piece by Michael Bigs in the American Journal of Sociology. Here’s the abstract:

Historians have persistently likened strike waves to wildfires, avalanches, and epidemics. These phenomena are characterized by a power-law distribution of event sizes. This kind of analysis is applied to outbreaks of class conflict in Chicago from 1881 to 1886. Events are defined as individual strikes or miniature strike waves; size is measured by the number of establishments or workers involved. In each case, events follow a power law spanning two or three orders of magnitude. A similar pattern is found for strikes in Paris from 1890 to 1899. The “forest fire” model serves to illustrate the kind of process that can generate this distribution.

One classic way to illustrate this is by using the analogy of grains of sand falling on a sand pile. Eventually, small and large avalanches begin to occur at different frequencies that follow a power law.

The study of complex systems is often called the study of history. The sand pile becomes increasingly unstable over time as grains of sand cause “fingers of instability” to run through the structure, like fissures running across a wine glass or cracks in the earth as an earthquake unloads the built up tension. If you want to understand the vulnerability of the sand pile of a “Richter 9″ earthquake, dissecting the falling grains will give you little insight. In other words, the answer lies in the past, in the evolution of the sand pile.

I make this point to reinforce the fact that the recent shooting and riots in Greece should be understood in context. The incident was  but one of several that befell Mount Olympus. As Katrin Verclas and others have commented (below) in response to this blog post, “the disenchantment of Greek students, the mistrust in and corruption of the right-wing government,”  as well as the “many acts of police brutality and incompetence through the years,” provides the historical context behind the shooting. “This is why people wouldn’t wait for the coronary report. There were many things wrong even before the shooting and the coronary report.”

Networks Analysis: One way to think about the impact of the information revolution on the ability of groups to mobilize and organize is to use the analogy of disease contagion, which also follows a power law distribution. As Clay Shirky writes, “The classic model for the spread of disease looks at three variables—likelihood of infection, likelihood of contact between any two people, and overall size of population. If any of those variables increases, the overall spread of disease increases as well.”

As a consequence of the information revolution, the likelihood of an individual receiving and broadcasting information is increasing significantly while the likelihood of any two people communicating is increasing exponentially; and world population is also growing at a furious pace. Since each of these three variables are increasing, the overall risk of protests increases as well.

The reason I raise this issue of power laws and epidemics of information is to address the issue of rumors. As Andrew Lam writes, “the streamlining of news [via Twitter and SMS] makes the story skeletal and thin, bordering on becoming rumor and hearsay.” Countering false rumors  in a highly connected network may require a systems approach since command-and-control is unlikely to work (short of switching the network off).

This is where the work by Malcom Gladwell, Mark Buchanan and and the Santa Fe Institute’s (SFI) research might shed some light on the viral cure for false rumors in the Twitter Age.

See also my follow up post on the Greek riots.

Patrick Philippe Meier

Links: Satellites Spy on DC, Tor, Real Time Mapping

• Trading Bronze Age Technology: Before the BlackBerry, before the iPhone, before e-mailing, texting and instant messaging, was an ivory-hinged boxwood writing board.

• Thematic Mapping Presentation: Bjørn Sandvik is doing some of the most interesting work on thematic mapping, which is why he was recently invited to give a presentation on his mapping engine at Google.

• Satellites Spy on DC: Some of the first images to be collected by the GeoEye 1 satellite that can “see” objects on Earth as small as a 0.41 meters in size in black-and-white mode or 1.64 meters in color.

• Tor Makes Anonymized Content Available to All: A new website serves as a portal to the underworld of anonymized content posted through the Tor network.

• Map of Casualties in Afghanistan: The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) has published a map of civilian, military and insurgent fatalities in Afghanistan from January to November 2008. The data is gathered from publicly recorded attacks.

• Decentralized Data Collection and Real Time Mapping: How can you get real time data from food security organizations operating on the ground in Africa into the hands of decision makers working to prevent famines based in Washington, DC? Ask my colleagues at DevelopmentSeed.

• Video Shows Every Flight on Earth in 72 Seconds: Stunning videos that remind me of food web dynamics (feeding relations) in ecosystems.

How to Visualize the Immense – Physics

I’m a wanna-be physicist; which is probably why one of my most memorable summers was spent at the Sante Fe Institute’s (SFI) Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) in 2006.

But this is not a recent fad, my International Baccalaureate (IB) courses in 1996 included advanced physics, advanced calculus and graph theory and advanced computer science. One of my favorite books at the time was Numerical Recipes in C. In fact, my extended essay for the IB was actually a software program that determines the degree of randomness of stellar distributions. This required writing code that could determine what constituted a star in any given picture with variable resolution, i.e., pattern recognition. Oh, the good old days.

My interest in the hard sciences explains why I’m still an avid reader of scientific journals, and why I just came across a special edition of The New Journal of Physics focused on visualization in physics. Some excerpts and pictures:

Early on in this twenty-first century, scientific communities are just starting to explore the potential of digital visualization. Whether visualization is used to represent and communicate complex concepts, or to understand and interpret experimental data, or to visualize solutions to complex dynamical equations, the basic tools of visualization are shared in each of these applications and implementations.

The effectiveness of visualization arises by exploiting the unmatched capability of the human eye and visual cortex to process the large information content of images. In a brief glance, we recognize patterns or identify subtle features even in noisy data, something that is difficult or impossible to achieve with more traditional forms of data analysis.

The advantages of visualization found for simulated data also hold for real world data as well. With the application of computerized acquisition many scientific disciplines are witnessing exponential growth rates of the volume of accumulated raw data [c.f., crowdsourcing conflict data], which often makes it daunting to condense the information into a manageable form, a challenge that can be addressed by modern visualization techniques.

This image shows a simulation of the distortion due to a spaceship inside a warp bubble moving past the Earth and Moon, as seen from space.

3D images of human bone can help predict fracture risk due to osteoporosis.

As one article in the Special Edition noted, visualization tools can be used to show internal properties of complex networks. As more raw, geo-referenced crisis data is collected, our field of conflict early warning and crisis mapping will need to start making sense of the volumes of new data. This is where the new field of Crisis Mapping Analytics (CMA) begins.

The purpose of CMA is to develop metrics and methods to identify patterns in conflict data over space and time. For more on CMA, see these two blog entries on “Crisis Mapping, Dynamic Visualization and Pattern Recognition” and “Tracking Genocide by Remote Sensing.” My hunch is that we should be talking to our colleagues in the hard sciences for tips on data visualization and patterns analysis.

Patrick Philippe Meier

Links: Obama, Picture Passwords, Mini-UAVs

• Obama, Internet and Elections: Obama’s victories in the Democratic primaries and the presidential election would not have been possible without Internet-empowered fundraising and social networking.

• Exchanging Pics to Generate Passwords: Using biometrics to protect confidential information when it is exchanged between two mobile devices. Could this be applied to SMS?

• Mini-UAVs used to Collect Health Samples: The National Health Laboratory Services of South Africa is using mini-UAV’s to collect HIV/AIDS and TB samples from remote health posts in the region. Could this be applied to conflict early warning and early response?

Social Web: Carrotmob, Anonymous and Second Life

The final panel I attended at the social web and networked political protests conference included interesting case studies on Carrotmob, Anonymous and Second Life.

Professor Caja Thimm gave a fascinating presentation on avatars in politics. Caja is particularly interested in studying Second Life (SL) as a new political platform:

Various politicans have their personal look alike avatars, from the French presidential candidate Le Pen to the presidentials hopeful Barack Obama. Various states (States of Hungary, Sweden ) run their virtual embassies to attract cyber visitors. SL is not only a place for political marketing or political campaining, it is also starting to function as a plattform for political activism. Avatars engage in demonstrations, in protestmarches, human chaines and smart mobs. Causes are many: for human rights in Burma, against the right wing French Le Pen, against nuclear energy, against the G8 summit and more. Recently, rising problems of a virtual society have become an issue. Sexual assualts, child pornography or vandalism call for political actions by the SL Residents on various levels.

Caja’s research focuses on how avatars and their human counterparts try to organize and (perhaps) democratize their newly created world. I find this a truly fascinating research topic and can’t wait to read Caja’s upcoming book on the subject. We happened to take the same train back to Frankfurt after the conference and it was interesting to hear some of the reactions she has had vis-a-vis this research topic. Only younger scholars seem to “get it”, others just miss the point entirely.

This raises another issue, or rather concern, that struck me while at the two-day conference. Here we are, the vast majority of us scholars, talking about the social web as experts, and yet only a tiny fraction of us at the conference actually have a blog. Of the sixty-or-so participants, three are on Twitter. Fewer still have avatars or a YouTube account. It is incredibly important that we actually use these social web tools if we want to study them. My understanding of blogs, their power, their network-effect and their negative side has completely and utterly changed after I started to blog. The same goes with Twitter. Which is why I went on Second Life this morning and created my first avatar.

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Mundo Yang presented his very interesting research on Anonymous. Mundo’s paper, entitled “Bringing ‘A for Anonymous’ and Public Sphere Together” is available here (PDF).

On Carrotmob:

It’s often said that you vote with your dollars, and what you buy sends signals to companies. But what if, rather then as individuals supporting businesses we like, or boycotting them en masse, we as a crowd were harnessed to financially reward companies that make the most change, as compared to other companies competing for the honor? What if we dropped the stick, and put out a carrot, that carrot being that you will have a “Carrot Mob” descend on your store and make a point of buying from you on a specified date, and perhaps even ongoing? That, I imagine, would be quite the motivation for a business to extend itself to make the effort to change or improve how they do business, generating immediate financial returns, positive press, and longer term goodwill from consumers (source).

Patrick Philippe Meier

Social Web: Twitter, Facebook and Digital Activism

The application of new communication tools for digital activism was specifically addressed at the conference on the social web and networked political protests. Andreas Jungherr focused on Twitter while Christina Newmayer and Celine Roff shared their findings on the use of Facebook for digital activism. I hope the presenters will agree to post a summary of their research on DigiActive.

Andreas, whose paper on the use of of Twitter for political activism is available here (PDF), drew on four case studies:

1. Assassination of Benazir Bhutto: the news of this event traveled with amazing speed through the community of Twitter users, even overtaking the speed by which the blogosphere was reacting. This incident shows the potential for political activists to distribute highly volatile information through Twitter.
2. 2008 SXSW conference in Austin: the journalist Sarah Lacy interviewed Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg in a keynote presentation. A large group of Twitter users in the audience started  sharing  negative reactions to Sarah’s interview style in real time on their respective Twitter-Feeds. Their criticism was first raised and amplified on their Twitter-Feeds before they expressed their criticism at the keynote presentation itself. This incident shows the potential for political activists to use Twitter as a powerful backchannel to social events.
3. San Diego wildfires in October 2007: volunteers and journalists started to use Twitter to distribute live updates on the position of fires and orchestrated collective action. This incident shows that political activists can use Twitter to efficiently coordinate social action and protests. I blogged about the use of Twitter in San Diego here.
4. Arrest and release of James Karl Buck in April 2008: the American journalism student was arrested by the Egyptian police while covering a protest event. Via SMS he posted the word “Arrested” on his Twitter-Feed. Friends and colleagues of his monitored his Twitter-Feed and could secure his release in a matter of hours. This incident shows that political activists can use Twitter to monitor each other’s situation and in doing so increase their security.

Christina and Celine used the case of Facebook and anti-FARC protests in Colombia. Their findings suggest that Facebook enhances the link from local to global. They suggest that the virtual world is not really virtual but rather an extension of the real world. They cite the fact that 87% of the countries in which the protests took place have a high a human development index (HDI).

Patrick Philippe Meier

Social Web: Digital Methods for the Study of Protest Content

Richard Rogers gave what I thought was the most interesting talk of the conference on the social web and networked political protests thus far. Richard is particularly interested in “web epistemology” and asks whether the transfer (or application) of social scientific methods to the online environment dilutes the value of the ensuing findings? Owing to the problem of exhaustiveness, findings may become “indicators” as opposed to “grounded theory.”

So what methods exist for the study of online protest content? How do we study links, websites, search engines and social networking sites.

• Links can be studied using hypertext theory; small worlds; paths; and social networks. When we browse online we collect digital information from link to link thereby authoring a story, we leave a digital trace, a narrative that can be studied.

• Websites can be studied by assessing usability; eye tracking heat maps; site optimization. Increasingly, browsing has led to searching. For example, Google once used to have a directory on it’s home page. No longer.

• Search Engines can be studied as dark web matter since no search engine is able to connect to the entire world wide web. Users are looking at fewer and fewer results displayed by search engines. In fact, studies suggest we very rarely look beyond the first 20 results of an online search. One can also capture and study results generated by search engines. Such research shows both the stability and volatility of the web.

• Social networking sites can be studied by focusing on characteristics of profiles, which have become what one might call “post-demographics”. Richard used the ElFriendo.com website to display the profile characteristics of “friends” of Obama and McCain. These characteristics tend to cluster, with Obama friends sharing the same favorite movies and TV shows, for example; and McCain friends sharing interests that have little overlap with those of Obama friends.

In conclusion, Richard asks whether virtual worlds are really that virtual as they increasingly import and reflect characteristics from the offline world? Should we continue using the term virtual world? I’m really eager to read up on Richard’s excellent research.

Patrick Philippe Meier