Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 200

more than just confirm weak ties, as we concluded for local, grounded
communities. But, indeed, as van de Donk and colleagues ( 2004b ) and
others have stressed, the Internet will not easily fully replace traditional
forms of protest.
A clear example of these changes is the protests of the anti- or
other-globalisationists at the turn of the millennium. On 18 June
1999, several thousand people demonstrated in the City of London
in the Carnival against Capital. What could have been seen as one
out of many national protest meetings against the major international
financial institutions was markedly different from others, according
to Scott and Street ( 2001 : 41). It was different because (i) it was
one of the most violent demonstrations in London for a long time;
(ii) the usual planning arrangements between organisers and the police
were not made in advance; (iii) it was coordinated with several simi-
lar events in other major cities around the world, coinciding all with
the G8 summit in Germany; and (iv) it was organised almost com-
pletely through Internet in a decentralised way, without one major
formal NGO holding responsibility. According to Scott and Street, this
Carnival against Capital seems to be a model for a new form and
organisational mode of civil society protest. Although it is much too
early to draw final conclusions as to whether or not this model is
here to stay (and arguably some of these characteristics - such as the
violent character and the absence of planning with authorities - have
not really remained dominant in global civil society protesting), the
Internet and ICT do seem to have a long-lasting effect on global civil
society.
In the fluid networks of global activism, the Internet has become
an organisational force shaping the network relations as well as the
organisational nodes themselves. The dynamic networking, unpre-
dictable traffic patterns and openness of the Internet may give sudden
rise to NGO organisations from obscurity to centrality and permits
organisations to join and leave networks relatively easily. The rela-
tive stability of the national environmental NGO landscape during
the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s is complemented by the end of the
second millennium by a much more dynamic and flexible pattern of
global NGO configurations, networks and coalitions, as, for instance,
shown by Jubilee 2000 and the A16-2000 umbrella organizations. The
and the poorer national Greenpeace subsidiaries (interview Greenpeace
campaigner, 2005).