Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 201

functioning of the World Social Forum, 9 a flexible network of different
kinds of NGOs from all over the world who come together regularly
at different places, has been possible only as a result of the existence
of Internet and ICT. Some, however, have criticised the World Social
Forum for relying too much on a political-institutional organisation
scheme and too little on a communicational-networked arrangement
(cf. Waterman, 2005 ). These virtual and 'corporal' umbrella platforms
bring constantly changing coalitions together for protests or activities,
to sometimes melt into thin air directly after these protest and activities.
At the same time, the position of the more formalized NGOs partic-
ipating in those campaigns and manifestations is far from stable and
predictable. Sometimes they are the main constituents and organisers;
at other times, these NGOs step in an existing fluid network when it
is already functioning, or they step out of such global networks just
before major events give these networks or fluids global significance. In
addition, as Bennett ( 2004 ) correctly argues, the virtual networks tend
to be less strict in ideology and accommodate a diversity of groups and
activists under rather loosely defined common denominators as child
labour, sweat shops, fair trade labels or corporate globalism.
In one of the few empirical surveys on the role of the Internet
and ICT (or computer-mediated communication, CMD) in global
activism, della Porte and Mosca ( 2005 ) interviewed protesters at the
anti-G8 protest in Genoa (July 2001) and participants in the Euro-
pean Social Forum ESF in Florence (November 2002). They were
especially interested in the contribution of the Internet to organising,
protesting, identity formation and cognitive functions. With respect
to the use of Internet in organising protests, they found that the Web
and CMC had indeed become the key organisational devices, as they
lowered costs of mobilisation, facilitated logistics and eased com-
municating the content of the protests. The protesters who mostly
used the Internet were well educated, young and had already expe-
rienced computer technologies in their organisations (which was not
as common in 2001 as it was in 2007). Protesting via the Web took
various forms, online petitions being most popular among the par-
ticipants (66 percent), followed by creating Web sites with names
close to the organizations they aimed to address, 10 netstrikes and mail

9

The WSF is the alternative of NGOs to the World Economic Forum, where the
political and economic elite meet every other year.

10

Such as http://www.worldbunk.org; http://whirledbank.org;
http://www.gatt.org; http//:www.genoa-g8.org; and http://www.seattlewto.org.