Looking Forward - Class Projects

As of now, I am pretty clear as to what is being asked of for the class project. We will be gradually building and working towards our final goal, and through this method we will be able to incorporate what we discuss and learn in class into our own research. At this point, my only concern is just locating a specific topic/question that will drive my research.

Ekman Response

Ekman's essay researches the 'Darker Side' of digital activism, focusing on extreme right-wing activists in Sweden. After giving a historical background about the movement, Ekman's main goal is to analyze how these groups use digitality to endorse their cause, specifically through Youtube.
I think Ekman's analysis falls right in line with Stewart, Smith, and Denton's perspective, most particularly with the concept of 'transferring perceptions of reality'. This is obviously a key focus for the right-wing extremists in Sweden, as Ekman highlights their showcase of seemingly innocent or 'everyday', as he describes it, activities like hiking or socializing. This is used as a technique to relate with the audience, to make them feel like this is something that would interest them to be doing.
I think Youtube is a great platform for the type of persuasion that Ekman analyzes, because the videos can be personally edited and framed in any way, and then presented on an objective or unbiased format. There are no caution advisories stating that the content is racist or anti-Semitic, it is just presented, and the audience needs to decide how they are to respond to the video with no presumptions.
What I find most fascinating is this idea of transferring perceptions of reality, it seems to me to be the ultimate goal of rhetoricizing. While it does appear very abstract and substantial, changing the reality of a person can be as simple as adjusting the relationship between their personal narrative viewpoint and the world that they act within.

Response to Papacharissi

In The Internet, the Public Sphere, and beyond, Papacharissi examines the concept of a public sphere, and idea created by Habermas (1962), which describes where a community of citizens promote their ideas and opinions. Papacharissi examines the traditional model of the public sphere, and extends this examination to the more recent 'virtual sphere' brought about by communicative technology like the internet. Based off of her findings, Papacharissi then offers a concept for a new virtual sphere, version 2.0, which she writes has potential for coming to be in the future, based off of more contemporary social and political happenings throughout the digital world.
I think the concept of a public sphere is very reasonable, however, I worry that Habermas' "rational accord" requirement is too strong. First, we need a definition of what rationality means. Second, he seems to introduce this to separate public sphere from just mere public space, but it seems to me that you could still have a functioning public sphere without every single member acting rationally, necessarily. It seems to me, that a public sphere would work just fine with members contributing however they would like. I believe the rationality requirement would have to be applied to the structure, in some form of sustained coherence throughout the sphere, regulated by the system in such a way that it doesn't remove or delete comments, only reorganizes them.

Week 5 Reflection

The most influential consequence of these first five weeks has been the awareness brought to me about digital activism. I have never really thought about digital activism, at least, I have never separated it from physical(?) activism. I think that my assumption has always been that there are activist organizations out there, and they use the internet to help promote their cause, but I have never thought about how effective or ineffective these methods are, or how important they are. After becoming aware of the distinction, and beginning to think about what digital activism is, I developed a skeptical bias towards digital activism. I noted in my first assignment that I feel a lack of intimacy in digital activism, and while I still hold this concern to a certain extent, by developing a broader knowledge of what digital activism is, I am beginning to focus on the distinction I noted before. It seems to me that digital activism has a specific cause, to broaden communication, but it also can make a real difference in physical change. For example, one of the websites I chose to rhetorically analyze focused on petition postings where users could sign petitions electronically. Reading through the website I saw not only petitions that moved me, but also that a lot of these petitions have made real difference in policy making and societal perspective. So while up to now we have been focused on developing a sense of what activism and digital activism are, I think moving forward my focus will turn towards the effectiveness and the outcomes that digital activism produces.

Potential Research Organization

My tentative choice is the Sierra Club. I have been following this organization on Facebook for over a year and they are constantly appearing on my news feed with posts or articles or links to webpages, and to me they embody what an effective activist organization should strive to be. They relate directly to my definition of activism, as they are actively trying to promote and direct social/political change in the favor of environmental conservation. I am interested in this organization because I am a supporter of their efforts, I have done a few projects on environmental conservation in the past that relate to their message, and I think they do a great job of conveying information that is directly conducive to their cause. However, I am not an active participant in environmental activism, and I believe through further research into this organization I and the class can become more knowledgeable of contemporary topics and how to take action.

Response to Kavada and Endres/Senda-Cook

Kavada writes about the research of activism across multiple digital platforms. The article focuses primarily on Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube, and how a particular activist group functions within these structures. Kavada identifies the differences in user participation, relative to each site, as well as how effective these platforms are. The research was inspired by critics' challenge against digital activism that it develops great masses of followers, but these followers are weakly committed. Kavada's research shows that while this challenge is a possibility for digital media platforms, they also serve as powerful resources for communal information sharing.
Endres and Senda-Cook write on the importance of place in rhetoric. Focusing on activism, they identify the multiple facets of how place and space play a role in both imagined and real ways. Using multiple specific examples, they argue that place should always be considered when rhetoricizing, as it examples illuminate how important place can make a difference in how successful a movement is and how it is perceived.
I took a point from each article that I found captivating. In Kavada, the notions of 'slacktivism' and 'clicktivism' are introduced, describing those 'so-called' activists who only participate from the arm chair and don't really take much action. Furthermore, Kavada writes that when one is attached to an activist group online, especially on social media communities like Facebook, that an added pressure from their friends and families who will 'see' their activity is bestowed upon the user. This is an important factor that hadn't crossed my mind, and I have not yet figured out if this is helpful for the activist organizations or if it takes away from the true reason behind someone's support, but it is an interesting question to ponder moving forward.
In the Endres/Senda-Cook article, they mentioned how place affects 'co-presence' vs 'mediated experience' of the protestors. How does this translate to digital activism? When analyzing a webpage, it seems that the presence that it creates should take the form of 'place' in this non-physical sense. So moving forward, we can include in our discussion of digital rhetoric, how does the page/organization establish co-presence or mediated experience?

Stewart, Smith, and Denton Response

Chapter 3 of Persuasion and Social Movements focuses on what the persuasive functions of a social movement are. It analyzes how social movements use persuasion to alter the perceptions of the protesters, as well as strategies for how movements should mobilize for action. The chapter is extremely detailed, including relevant historical figures in both the US and around the world, and the authors obviously want to present an unbiased examination of how social movements work. They do take the position of accepting social movements as important, but this doesn't place bias in either direction.
I enjoyed the section on how movements must alter the perceptions of the protesters. This is something new, as everything we've read up to now has focused on how movements use rhetoric to alter the perceptions of the oppressors or unmoved masses, so it was interesting to learn how movements 'transfer perceptions of reality' among their own supporters. I do think that all of these 7 subsections of chapter 3 translate to digital activism, but even this section alone translates very well. I have mentioned before that I believe digital activism lacks a sense of intimacy, or intimacy-likeness, and movements must use this strategy in order to change that in their favor. Maintaining the power to change the perception or narrative reality of the audience is, on its own, enough to be a primary focus for social movements, because that is the mission objective of activism: to educate the public and to bring about change.