Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
telegraph, and the telephone were used to coordinate actions among dispersed
actors. For example, Featherstone (
2005
) illustrates how networks of correspon-
dence among strikers in eighteenth century London were critical to coordinating
their actions. Yet cyberspace has taken this process to an entirely different level of
participation and activism, allowing the ready expansion to truly global networks.
In the late 1980s, peace and environmental activists used the internet in Britain
(GreenNet), the U.S. (PeaceNet), and Sweden (NordNet), projects that merged in
1990 to form an umbrella network under the name of the Association for Pro-
gressive Communications (Deibert and Rohozinski
2008
). Various groups that
coagulated around the United Nations' Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992
used the internet to coordinate their actions.
Cyberspace famously played a significant role in the Zapatista uprising in
Mexico in 1994, the world's first highly publicized case of internet activism, when
subcommander Marcos became known worldwide through his email missives
(Froehling
1997
; Cleaver
1998
; Knudsen
1998
) and rebel hacktivists launched
denial-of-service attacks on Mexican government websites (Johnston and Laxer
2003
). The international publicity that internet activism brought to bear on the
Zapatistas is widely credited with preventing the Mexican government from insti-
gating a military crackdown on Chiapas. The ''Zapatista effect,'' however, has also
led many international donors to exaggerate the emancipatory role of information
technology and foster unwarranted optimism about its potential (Mercer
2004
).
Today, internet usage among social activists is so common as to be unre-
markable, as demonstrated by the burgeoning literature on the topic (Hill and
Hughes
1998
; Palczewski
2001
; van de Donk et al.
2004
; Chadwick
2006
). The
agents who deploy cyberspace, and the purposes and means to which it is put, are
as varied as the multiple causes that they take up. So widespread and diffuse is
internet usage that progressive internet portals arose to help coordinate disparate
sources of information, such as those offered by the Institute for Global Com-
munications (
www.igc.org
), the Association for Progressive Communications
(
www.apc.org
)
, and One World (
www.oneworld.net
)
. Two decades of practice and
scholarship have demonstrated that cyberspace neither confirms the fantasies of
early utopians nor the dystopian visions of techno pessimists.
The internet has been widely used by anti-globalization activists, such as in the
coordination of protests against the World Trade Organization in the famous
''Battle in Seattle'' in 1999 (Smith
2001
), a key moment in contemporary struggles
against corporate hegemony, against the World Bank and IMF in Washington, DC
in 2000 (Juris
2005
), and against the G-8 meeting in Genoa in 2001 (Johnston and
Laxer
2003
; Porta and Mosca
2005
). The Canadian-led global campaign in 1998
against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), put forth by the Orga-
nization for Economic Cooperation and Development to facilitate the movement
of capital but not labor, succeeded in pushing it off the OECD's agenda using
broad alliances forged over the internet, one of series of blows against neoliber-
alism and the Washington Consensus (Deibert
2000
; Johnston and Laxer
2003
).
Similarly, corporate behavior has come under mounting cyberscrutiny. The
global
movement
to
improve
working
conditions
in
textile
and
footwear
