Published: September 26th 2010 - at 11:55 amHow online activism could transform our political culture
contribution by Hannah Lownsbrough
A vital source of hope for UK progressives facing a challenging new landscape is the rapid growth of our online presence.
Both the Australian Labor Party and the US Democrats achieved significant political recoveries in recent years with online initiatives such as MoveOn.org in the USA (www.moveon.org) and GetUp.org in Australia playing a key role.
Here in the UK a number of comparable organisations are emerging. My organisation, 38 Degrees, already has over 100,000 people on its email list. Avaaz, which aims to organise globally along the same lines that MoveOn.org organises in the US, has a high UK membership too.
Online activism is shaking up our political processes and transforming our political culture in a number of ways – from building new bridges between parties and NGOs to blurring the boundaries between the production and consumption of news and political commentary.
But perhaps the most important way in which online organising offers hope to tired and frustrated progressives in the UK is as much about looking back as it is forwards. Our online lives make possible a re-convergence of our social and political identities.
A consistent feature of many of the most vibrant periods in the UK’s political history has been the extent to which people’s political and personal lives have been integrated. The most powerful examples of mass organisation and opposition to the political status quo have emerged where people’s political identities were not separate from their wider life.
As a miner, for instance, union involvement mapped on to the broader life of communities: your union colleagues were also your work colleagues, their children probably attended the same school as your own and if your family was religious, you quite possibly shared the same place of worship.
Longer ago, battles against slavery and for universal suffrage happened in no small part due to the deployment of existing social networks, through study, faith or broader social ties, to ensure that one’s political beliefs and activism were not detached from the day to day business of life: working, socialising, worshipping or educating one’s children.
38 Degrees’ experience already seems to illustrate that real-life relationships are central to building a vibrant political movement. Our internal data shows that most of our growth as an organisation comes simply from people pressing forward on one of our emails; usually without being explicitly asked, they forward our emails to other people they know who they believe will share their concern about an issue.
On social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser extent, MySpace, there’s growing evidence that people’s political interests are sitting comfortably alongside their social and work lives. Much is already made of the diminishing separation between work life and personal life, as people make their status updates and tweets available to people from all aspects of their personal and professional networks. Even more importantly, people are happy to ‘badge’ themselves as supportive of particular causes in these spaces with seemingly greater ease than offline.
Online organising opens new doors in offering excitement and a sense of immediacy about taking action. But it also may yet re-open the long-closed doors that made political life as much a part of everyday experience as going to work, caring for your loved ones and socialising with your friends.
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Hannah Lownsbrough is Campaigns Director at 38 Degrees. She writes in a personal capacity. This article is based on an essay in the latest edition of Renewal.
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Reader comments
Of course online participation and online political activism has the potential to do good, reach new people otherwise put off politics and activism, bu there is a tendency by some to do it wrong.
Aside from the crucial point that online activism must be matched by offline activism, the online content cannot presume the reader we want to reach to is as nerdy as the bloggers, which is why Tim Ireland has done so well with his campaigns, and the many other bloggers who spend a lot of time countering what our unpalatable tabloids have to say.
I’ve little doubt 38 degrees – an organisation I hold in high esteem – will ensure they promote online participation in the way I have spelt out above, for this way the internet will really be the landscape to take politics and activism to a new level. Otherwise, we simply create Iain Dale’s – which is a bad idea.
Agreed. The danger however is of clicktivism replacing rather than complementing the real-life offline work of community-organisation. In order to ensure that this doesn’t happen, it is important that online activism is as radical and angry and caring and community-building as offline activism. It needs to be about getting candidates elected, about responding to all sorts of big wrongs, about changing things rather than just building larger and larger mailing lists.
It needs to move beyond vanilla. IT HAS DONE THIS IN THE STATES AND AUSTRALIA, and, to extent, worldwide, through the Ecological Internet, Avaaz, etc.
But it hasn’t done this yet in Britain.
I doubt if the public at large will be fooled for long by 38 Degrees or any similar organizations.
These groups present themselves as facilitating ordinary citizens concerned about particular issues to have a voice. But, in fact, as the existence of this OP confirms, they are really committed leftists operating under a false flag.
Why is their ideology disguised?
Simple. Because ordinary people wouldn’t give them the time of day if they knew. The faux-democratic, faux-participatory, issue-based approach is just persiflage.
Have to agree with R.Read here. GetUp! in Australia has been successful because:
(a) they filled a massive gap in culture that needed to be filled by a progressive movement
(b) they have been POLITICAL (which 38degrees & Avaaz have failed to be)
(c) they have taken their initiatives further than petitions – like the way in which they bought Abbott’s surf sessions for an asylum seeker to challenge his perspective.
In the UK, charities & NGOs have failed significantly to become political, largely because we have legislation that prevents that. Yet, corporate lobbying carries on regardless. We need to challenge that regulation, take the Liberal Democrats on their word (the Liberal part anyway) and challenge them for it.
What 38degrees has the potential for, what MoveOn and GetUp! have achieved, seems to be slipping through our fingers if we don’t change charity-regulations…
#3
Why is it any different than entities such as the so-called Taxpayers Alliance? I pay tax, and they dont speak for me. They are just a right wing front, not the independant organisation they like to portray themselves as.
@ 5
The Taxpayers Alliance isn’t set up as a charity and is transparent about it’s position and aims. It’s a campaigning organization with an open and declared agenda. Quite different.
Jay,
The taxpayers Alliance isnt open and transparent! It never has been. And its right wing views are well known, and it doesnt represent the views of taxpayers as its name suggests. It often gets undue prominence on the basis of “we represent taxpayers”.
John Ruddy
If “the taxpayers Alliance isn’t open and transparent”, then how come “its right wing views are well known”?
From its website:
The TaxPayers’ Alliance is Britain’s independent grassroots campaign for lower taxes. …
The TPA’s mission is:
• To reverse the perception that big government is necessary and irreversible
• To explain the benefits of a low tax economy
• To give taxpayers a voice in the corridors of power
To this end, the TaxPayers’ Alliance will:
• Oppose all tax rises
• Oppose EU tax harmonisation
• Criticise all examples of wasteful and unnecessary spending
• Champion opportunities for votes on tax and spending
It could hardly be clearer than that.
I pay tax, and they don’t speak for me.
yeah, and I work but the Labour Party doesn’t speak for me.
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