Cyberthrongs

Description

David de Ugarte:

“We all have an intuitive idea of what cyberthrongs are.

One nonproblematic definition might be:

- The kind of mobilisation which constitutes the culmination of a process of social debate carried out by personal communication and electronic publishing media in which the divide between cyberactivists and mobilised masses breaks down.

The main idea is that it is the social network as a whole that puts cyberactivism into practice and makes it grow – unlike other processes, such as the Colour Revolutions, in which the permanence of decentralised structure side by side with distributed ones led to the preservation of a clear divide between cyberactivists and the social base. As seen, there were “organising organisations”, even if they were mere small social activist subnetworks, rather than traditional organisations.

One of the characteristic traits of cyberthrongs is that it's impossible to find in them an “organiser”, a responsible, stable “dynamising group.” At the very most, original “proposers” can be found who during the course of the mobilisation tend to disappear within the movement itself. Among other things, because cyberthrongs emerge at the periphery of informative networks, not at their centre.

The problem which such new movements as those that we have characterised as cyberthrongs, and which have such an influence over political agendas, is that it is extremely difficult to discuss or analyse them without one's judgement or perception being mediated by their consequences, or by their position within the political debates they open.

This was obviously the case with the demonstrations that took place in Spain on the night of 13th March 2004. It had happened before in the Philippines. It might seem that the French case would lend itself more easily to a dispassionate analysis, as the movement is so poor ideologically and has been so universally rejected.

However, as it has become mixed up in the media with the immigration debate, and even with the fear of Jihadi terrorism, it isn't free of partisan conditioning either. When we approach this kind of movement, the first thing we notice is the existence of a clear distinction between a deliberative, debate phase, and a later organisation and street mobilisation phase. The former is relatively lengthy if underground inasmuch as it is not reflected in any traditional mirror. In fact, in the three most recent cases, blogs played a key instrumental role, although the “conversation” started by each one logically involved different areas of the blogosphere. In fact, the tendency seems to be for the web to have an increasing importance in this phase, as personal publication technologies spread.

Let us move from the Philippine local radios and online fora in 2001 to the mixture of alternative digital media, fora and relatively central, ideologised blogs in the period of 11th12th March 2004 in Spain, and finally come to the so-called “peripheral blogosphere” which arose in France in November 2005 and in Spain during the 2006 Big BoozeUp.

In each case, not only the number of emitters increases with respect to the previous one, but also the total number of people involved.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf)