New platforms, old tricks

Jessica Reed, 10 October 2007
Subjects:

Yesterday Amnesty UK launched its "unsubscribe me" campaign, which aims to use social media networks to unite a new generation of human rights campaigners. Their hope is to set up a viral virtual campaign gathering as many names as possible from participants saying "I unsubscribe from torture, rendition, discrimination and unlawful detention".

In other words, Amnesty wants to be down with the kids and reach out to a young(er) audience using social network-inspired platforms to spread their message. [more...]

An event to launch the campaign at the Amnesty UK headquarters gathered a few bloggers, some press/new media people and four speakers: Johnny Chatterton (I blogged about his Protect the Monks Facebook campaign here), Paul Hilder from the activist site avaaz.org (also an openDemocracy author), Kevin Anderson (1) Guardian blogs editor, and Gemma Tumelty, president of the National Union of Students. Gemma was invited following HSBC's recent U-Turn on overdrafts charges, thanks to a successful Facebook-led campaign to rally students to the cause.

It's all about the "moment"

I found the talk to be predictable and slightly amusing as it seemed that nobody really knew how to grasp the power of virtual activism and mobilisations: there was a lot of talk about "turning points", "tipping points" and "catching the moment". A lot was said about the power of such tools and how quickly it is possible for activists to spark a popular interest to their cause, since Facebook (and other similar sites) are based on friendships and trust, rather than a top-down mechanism. There clearly was a lot of enthusiasm for new technologies, but few ideas about concrete actions to be taken beyond the collection of symbolic signatures.

The Facebook Protect the Monks group is 380.000 members strong. Protests were held around the world, Elie Wiesel wrote a really nice note to the participants, and the media talked about it. A lot. In fact, they absolutely loved it.

But do campaigns such as these really work? According to Chatterton, it won't make a huge difference to the core of the issue: he doesn't think Burmese generals are paying attention to his group, but simply hopes to show how much support there is for the current protests while pressuring local politicians to take action.

The future of protests lies in mobility and DIY options

What about the durability of said protests? They seem to only last for a few weeks, coming and going at a very quick pace. Furthermore, the platforms on which they are carried will not last.

Those of us old enough to have known Friendster adopt a knowing smile when hearing people claim that Facebook will last: like Myspace, Facebook will enter a phase of steady decline, and will be replaced by more mobile platforms with which information will be passed from hand to hand ever more quickly. With the use of mobile technology such as mobile phones, people will sign petitions which will no doubt reach an extravagant numbers of signatories - but we still haven't found a way to make them count, and capitalise on the discontentment they represent.

This might be what Amnesty is trying to do: as an NGO which will undeniably last, it is a platform, unlike Facebook, that will not fade away in the next few years. It's just a shame that they seem unclear how they will go about it, and how they will manage to put meaning back into a list of names.

Jon Bright (from OurKingdom) cleverly pointed out that unlike Facebook groups, Amnesty does not give the participants the means to extend the campaign outwards (minus a forwarding option to tell friends about it, and a few widgets to place on livejournals accounts and the like). This is perhaps why it is not a new radical breed of virtual campaigning as it doesn't open up the campaign for people to do work on it on their own and as a result it is simply an old-school petition adorned with an official Amnesty movie.

(1) personal note: Kevin Anderson was actually a pleasure to listen to, and as a blogger I was much relieved and happy to hear him address the competition between holier-than-thou journalists and looked-down-upon bloggers, about which he said: "The only difference between you [bloggers] and I is that I happen to be talking in this panel right now, not a fancy journalism diploma". He also mentioned that his love for blogging stemmed from his passion for "ordinary voices", which was nice to hear.

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Comments

damianrafferty
11 October 2007 - 12:44pm
Paul from Avaaz talked about how signatures had opened doors to important meetings, Johnny noted the importance of sign ups for getting their message into the mainstream media and also for organising demos around the world, Gemma talked about how they forced down HSBC and were mobilising for a demo etc etc. I could go on with lots of other examples from the night. The clear message of the night in this respect was that digital campaigns only took off and produced results when combined with traditional media and physical campaigning. Johnny's scepticism about whether Burmese generals use Facebook should not be taken as a fatalistic dismissal of digital campaigning. Even Burmese generals have to take account of international opinion and his group has helped force world leaders to take notice of what is happening over there and in Paul's words, they have extended the CNN moment from a single week to several months. Kevin discussed the power of Egyptian bloggers to shame the police force their after shocking footage of police brutality was shared around. In summary, I think the event was actually chock-a-block with examples of practical actions and positive outcomes. On the question of what is Amnesty going to do with a million or 10 million people who unsubscribe from human rights abuses in the war on terror, well I would say that Amnesty is absolutely geared up to take advantage of something like this to change government policy and to create debate. The innumerable successes of Amnesty over the years have shown just how powerful ordinary people can be when they write a letter or take a simple action to show that they know what is going on in the world and they are not going to ignore it. But even if the event hadn't focussed so much on practical applications, the night was really about establishing dialogue and making connections and giving something back to our supporters who are interested in digital campaigning. We have had some really great feedback but no one would claim that we succeeded in defining what digital campaigning was (but we never set out to). On a related issue, I am glad to say that Jon Bright may be clever but he is also fortunately wrong, "Jon Bright (from OurKingdom) cleverly pointed out that unlike Facebook groups, Amnesty does not give the participants the means to extend the campaign outwards (minus a forwarding option to tell friends about it, and a few widgets to place on livejournals accounts and the like). The Unsubscribe site has a facility for people to include their own groups. Since we launched, people we don't even know have gone out and created sites on Orkut and LiveJournal and we have then promoted them on the hub. These are in addition to the Bebo, MySpace and Flickr groups we made plus the Facebook cause and group. Our thinking was that we were not going to build a huge digital palace to keep all our supporters in but instead provide tools for people to unsubscribe in their own natural environments, whether that be Facebook, MySpace, a local Amnesty group or wherever. Visit the site for links to all these. If on the other hand, we have missed a trick, let us know. Or better still, go and do something amazing on last.fm or something we haven't even thought of and drop us a line so we can support you. Basically, we want to bring our strengths as a campaigning organisation to the party but that is pretty pointless if there is no one there to party with. Damian Rafferty - Amnesty International
jon.bright
12 October 2007 - 6:17pm
how embarrassing. I knew Jess was putting in something I said, but I didn't realise she was going to pretend I was 'clever' - not a claim I'd make myself. I'm sure I came across as a smug self-obsessed git. Oh well. As to my point, i don't think I expressed it too well to her. It's more like this. If I've learnt anything from the people I've met while working for openDemocracy, it's that people engage with something most when they feel ownership of it. This is something that is repeated all over the web - allowing people to comment, creation of user accounts etc. is part of it. But I think facebook does something more radical than that - by letting people build their own applications, it allows users to not only participate but change the central message of what facebook is about. Second Life is similar - it gives people control over what they create. This is why so many people spend vast amounts of free hours making it a success. I think unsubscribe does go in that direction. it does, as you say, give people multiple forums for getting involved, and they can bring their own to the party, in your words. But what might happen if you were even more radical than that, and opened out the central message to participation? Made it into something like YourAmnesty - giving away some control? It is this type of thing that new web technologies are beginning to enable. Of course theres a lot of potential dangers with such an idea. The central message of unsubscribe could be watered down or taken in a direction you didn't like. A campaign could be difficult to manage without unity around its central message. I'm sure you can think of a few others. But I'm just wondering how much energy you could generate on the basis of running a campaign in such a way, and what the results might be. This is what I think is the true potential of organising campaigns on the basis of the net. Good luck with the rest of the campaign. Jon

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