Ejournal

Gary D. Malaney
Editor, StudentAffairs On-Line
malaney@educ.umass.edu

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 MoveOnT 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

About the MoveOnT family of organizations. (2006). Retrieved November 10, 2006 from http://www.moveon.org/about.html.