Use Your Skills to Solve this Challenge: Discourses of Online Microaction

• In Event: 277 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 17. Information Technology and Movements

Abstract

The use of information and communication technologies by activists for social change has received increasing attention from social movement scholars in recent years. With the advent of more participatory Web 2.0 platforms, the boundaries of what constitutes “activism” seem to become more and more blurred (Earl & Kimport 2011).

This paper investigates an architecture of participation that organizes volunteering for non-profit organizations. Sparked.com organizes what they call micro-volunteering, where individual users take on so-called challenges posted by non-profits -- tasks that they want support with. Tactics outweigh goals here: the application is a sophisticated Web 2.0 infrastructure featuring game design and visuals. It is intriguing, inviting users to participate through design, rhetoric, and rewards. Design and discourse set the tone for what happens in the actual interactions and actions online between users. It is the gamified structure that I am analyzing in this study.

The governing structure of Web 2.0 platforms exhibits a hybrid character with regard to political empowerment: On the one hand, it can be seen as productive tools for action, “digitally enabling social change” in a qualitatively new way (Earl & Kimport, 2011); on the other hand, it channels action into certain directions, possibly precluding deliberation or critical challenge of underlying logics. Platforms organizing action usually do not seem to facilitate questioning and contention, in short: the challenge of dominant discourses. This, of course, has important implications for what it means to organize activism for social change in a networked world.

Author

• Carla Ilten, University of Illinois-Chicago