The Internet and Student Activism
Gary D. Malaney
Editor, StudentAffairs
On-Line
It is probably obvious that
communication has always been necessary for collective action (Graber, et al.,
2004), and information has always been an essential resource for such action
(Hill & Hughes, 1998). These
authors and others, such as Rheingold (2002), have noted that technology
increasingly (especially over the last 20 years) has made it easier for more
people to communicate, disseminate information, and to participate in social
and political activism.
The Internet
certainly has been in the forefront of what McCaughey and Ayers (2003) call
“cyberactivism.” McCaughey and Ayers
(2003) refer to “cyberactivism” as simply political activism on the Internet,
not to be confused with the term “hactivism,” which is generally viewed as a
type of cyberactivism. Hactivism is
derived from the terms “activism” and “hacking,” the latter of which pertains
to illicit computer break-ins or manipulation of any technology for unorthodox
means (Jordan & Taylor, 2004), so hactivism can be thought of as tampering
with computer systems for the purpose of some political or social cause. Although hactivism is clearly a part of
social and political activism, it is not the focus of this article. Instead, the focus here is on the many legal
acts of activism in which students engage on the Internet, such as chatting,
blogging, publishing, and petitioning, all of which are discussed below.
High school and
college students across the country are no strangers to this new world of
activism (Kornblum, 2006), and due to their proficiency with computer
technology, such activities are generally easy for them. One example of this new world can be viewed
at www.campusactivism.org, a
website devoted to on-line activism.
The purpose of this article is two-fold: a) to describe some of the on-line activist work of college
students, and b) to make the argument that student affairs should assist
students in their activist work.
Student Cyberactivism
Jayson (2006) argued
that because of the Internet this generation of young people is much more aware
of the world. Although one could argue
that today’s young people have more knowledge readily available to them because
of the Internet, easy availability does not necessarily transfer into more
knowledge consumed. In fact, several
surveys have shown that young people know little about global issues (Adamson,
Belden, Davanzo, & Paterson, 2000; “Global Goofs,” 2002).
Regardless of the
average level of social and political knowledge of today’s students, clearly a
certain percentage of students have become very politically and socially aware
and active from using the Internet, and the way that they are being active
could be just the beginning of a very large network of future activists.
Two primary vehicles
for activism are the large computerized social networks: Facebook and MySpace
(Kornblum, 2006). According to the
Facebook web site, the network now has over 10 million members (http://umass.facebook.com/about.php),
and Kornblum stated that there are 4.5 million groups registered on the list,
most of which have only a few members but several groups have tens of thousands
of members. Several of the larger
groups pertain to activism, such as the “Legalize Same-Sex Marriage” group
which, at the time of Kornblum’s research, had 80,458 members. Although these social networks certainly
provide an area where students can learn more about a variety of issues,
whether or not this type of activism actually leads to change is
questionable. However, this process is
still in its infancy.
Chatting
As noted earlier,
information is crucial to activist work.
Books, newsletters, and cell meetings have always been important means
of information distribution. Today on
the Internet, chat rooms, listservs, and bulletin boards provide virtual
meeting spaces for discussion of any topic.
Although listservs and bulletin boards allow for extended communication
on topics, they do not allow for real time discussions like chatrooms, where a
person can type in message and other people who are logged on at the same time
can type in responses in real time so that actual conversations take place,
like group instant messaging. Several
services provide for group discussions, including Facebook, Yahoo, and America
Online, all of which have several registered activist groups. Some of these groups are have more
communication than others, and the amount of communication may depend upon the
time of year or a hot issue. A few
fairly active (over 400 messages per month) Yahoo activist groups include the
following: CitizensForLegitimateGovernment,
freedomfight, and trustthepeople-disc.
Major progressive magazines like Mother
Jones (www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/)also
have their own bulletin boards where readers can post messages and comment on
messages posted by other people.
Blogging
Blogs, or on-line
journals, have become very popular among social and political activists,
non-traditional journalists, and traditional news organizations (Klotz,
2004). Klotz noted that blogs entered a
new level of prominence during the early stages of the Iraq War in 2003, where
various military personnel, journalists, and dissidents reported their
experiences regarding the war. Although
individuals certainly seem to dominate the blog world (in fact, anyone can
prepare a blog), organizations blog as well.
MSNBC introduced blogs to its website in 2002, suggesting that the new
feature was an important development in journalism (Klotz, 2004).
Blogs also have been
used by various student activists.
CampusActivism.org has a number of links to activist blogs (www.campusactivism.org/blog/). Recently student blogs were credited with
influencing the decision of Gallaudet University’s Board of Trustees to revoke
the appointment of the president-designate (Read, 2006).
Publishing
Publishing activist
“zines” has been a popular form of protest for hundreds of years (Hudema,
2004). Of course, depending upon the
quality of the production, these newsletters and magazines have been fairly
expensive to produce, as well as slow and costly to disseminate. With the relatively low cost of newsletter
production on the web, some political interest groups produce news and opinion
pieces every day (Hill & Hughes, 1998).
The actual number of online zines is probably impossible to determine, but running various search engines for particular topics of interest will undoubtedly turn up a variety of online activist newletters and information sites. Here is a sampling: www.seattleactivism.org, zmagsite.zmag.org/curTOC.htm, http://www.wiretapmag.org/activism/33078/, and "Zine and Heard Again." Various search engines can provide more listings.
Petitioning
The Moveon.org (www.moveon.org) family of political and civic organizations which claims over 3 million members devoted to moving the country toward a progressive vision actually got its start with an online petition in 1998 at the time of the Congressional move to impeach President Bill Clinton (“About the MoveOn™ Family,” 2006). On September 18th 1998, they launched an online petition to "Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation," and had hundreds of thousands of signatures within days. Now, online petitioning has become so popular that websites have been developed to help groups post and maintain their signature gatherings. PetitionOnline.com offers such free hosting of online petitions, and they claim to have collected more than 37 million signatures for thousands of petitions. As noted on the site, “We give you the ancient methods of grassroots democracy, combined with the latest digital networked communications, running live and free 24 hours a day. The student protestors at Gallaudet used an online petition as one of their means of gathering support to protest the hiring of the new president. Although, online petitions are more popular than ever, their effectiveness is questionable (Kush, 2004).
The Role of Student Affairs Professionals and
Faculty
Hunter (1988)
praised the notion of student dissent and noted that student affairs
professionals must acknowledge that student activism is both natural and
desirable. Student activism appears to
be a logical extension of student development theory. After learning about disadvantage, inequality, and oppression,
students need to move beyond tolerance and acceptance, and they must develop
what Rhoads (1998) called a “collective consciousness,” sharing a common sense
of alienation and dissatisfaction. And
students need to be encouraged to take the next step to change the social
order.
Seven years ago I
re-designed a required class for the first-year master’s students in the higher
education program, and my intent was to instruct in curricular areas dealing
with all kinds of inequality (Malaney, 2006).
The topics include global political and economic oppression, as well as
race, class, and gender inequality. I
wanted my future student affairs professionals to be knowledgeable about all
forms of inequality, better understand global conditions, and be able to discuss
such important topics with their students.
More recently, I
began to think that I needed to do a little more for my students. Because of the required course, they now had
new knowledge of inequality, and they were in a better position to help educate
undergraduates about global political and social conditions. But I kept asking myself if that was
enough. I realized that if I wanted to
better assist my students to help their potential students to change the world,
I needed to teach a course in student activism. So, at the beginning of this fall semester, I began teaching
Higher Education and Student Activism.
In addition to the many standard hard copy readings for the course, I
also encouraged students to go on-line and investigate student activism via the
Internet. My hope was that these newly
minted student affairs professionals would begin not only to see larger
injustices than they might have imagined, but that they would be inspired to
help their undergraduates begin to change the world.
References
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DaVanzo, J., & Patterson, S.
(2000). How Americans view world population issues: A survey of public opinion.
Retrieved July 21, 2004, from http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1114/
Global goofs: U.S. youth can’t find Iraq. (2002).
Retrieved July 21, 2004, from http://www.cnn.com/
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