REVIEWS OF ARTICLES

From the Streets to the Internet:

The Cyber-Diffusion of Contention

By JEFFREY M. AYRES

The multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) was about to be surreptitiously moved in the year of 1998. But all of a sudden a wave of protests began to tighten around the treaty bringing it to a screeching halt. The question arised on why this whole state of affairs happened. That was when the full impact of the global phenomenon called internet came to the fore. It was a contentious politics Internet- style; where the rules had changed and the ideas of protests coalesced around the world.

This rapid dissemination of information around the world is unparalleled since its reach is consummate on the whole but yet can’t be fully trusted due to the fact that the unreliable and unverifiable information to can spread like wildfire and cause a major electronic riot.

At first glance, the Internet-inspired diffusion of contention might fall neatly into the category of impersonal channels. Yet the Internet challenges the dynamics of diffusion in ways beyond those encouraged by the so-called CNN effect of television. First, the diffusion of ideas and tactics occurs between individuals and groups much more quickly, potentially reducing the relevance of cultural connections or interpersonal networks for the spread of contention. In fact, it might be worth asking whether the Inter-net is encouraging new styles of collective action quite different from the styles attributed to social movements over the past twenty-five years, and if so, whether this postmodern phenomenon of cyber-diffusion portends a reawakening of those favored objects of study of the collective behavior school, including riots, fads, and panics. With the huge amount of data resources it has, the Internet removes barriers to the rapid diffusion of protest ideas, tactics, and strategies.

But on the higher side the ability of the Internet to quickly and effectively disseminate information across borders bolsters its potential as a medium for empowerment. It also has the ability to bring in people of all caste and creed together to work on a singular idea they share from seemingly half the way across the globe.

So the real potential of the internet has been unveiled, but it will take time to see whether it acts as an important medium for the diffusion of protest, ushered in the dawn of a new form of organized, popular protest, or has it introduced a pattern of repeated global electronic riots. There is no other way but to play the waiting game.

The Self-Organization of Cyberprotest

Christian Fuchs

ICT&S Center – Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society, University of Salzburg, Austria

Cyberspace is a global technologically mediated space of cognition, communication, and co-operation, a sphere of production, reproduction, and circulation of human knowledge. It is inherently networked, decentralized, and dynamic. The internet is a self organizing system which gains life only when people start to use it. It consists of both a technological infrastructure and communicating human actors. Together these two parts form a socio-technological system, the technological structure functions as a structural mass medium that produces and reproduces networked communicative actions and is itself produced and reproduced by communicative actions. An endless self-referential production cycle emerges in which objective and subjective knowledge, technological structures and human actions, produce each other mutually. The self-organization of the Internet is a permanent objectification of subjective knowledge and a subjectification of objective knowledge of global reach, it can be seen as a global productive dialectic of objective and subjective knowledge.

On the other hand Cyberprotest means the structural coupling of the Internet system and the protest system of society, where the two systems interlock, their self-organization processes produce each other mutually and affect each other. A self-organizing protest system enters the socio-technological Internet system on the actor level as a collective actor, the protest system is transformed into a virtual community that makes use of the global technological network of computer-networks of the Internet in order to permanently produce and reproduce globally distributed protest structures and practices. Structural knowledge emerges on the technological level of the Internet by processes of communication and co-operation of protestors, this structural knowledge enables the dynamic emergence of protest structures and practices on the actor level, i.e. the system of protest. Essentially cyberprotest is global structural coupling and mutual production of self organizational processes of the Internet and self organizational processes of the protest of the society. In cyberprotest the self organization of the internet system and the self organization of the protest system produce each other mutually in a self organization process, hence cyberprotest is a self organization of self organization process, a form of second order self organization.

Cyberprotest takes place in virtual space itself as virtual protest. In co-operative cyberprotest, protest takes place online, human actors co-operate in cyberspace in order to attack the information infrastructure of their opponents.Harry Cleaver takes up the interesting study of connecting cyber protests with rhizomes. He takes up The principle of connection, heterogeneity and multiplicity as factors which provide insight into the relations between the two.

The author has finally concluded that Self-organization is a dynamic threefold knowledge process of cognition, communication and co-operation and it is a medium of the consumption, circulation, and production of digital knowledge.