Armchair Activism That Works

[Ian David]

Martin Kearns and Jonathan Schwarz
February 01, 2007

Martin Kearns is executive director of Green Media Toolshed. Jonathan Schwarz’s website is www.tinyrevolution.com

One of the most remarkable , unexpected developments of the Internet has been the explosive growth of Wikipedia. At first glance, the Wikipedia concept—that thousands upon thousands of volunteers working with little central supervision can create a huge databank of accurate information—seems untenable. And yet the Wikipedia bumblebee flies anyway. While not flawless, Wikipedia has become an invaluable resource, with detailed articles on everything from arithmetic to geodesy to the movie "Zoolander."

Can progressives make this power of networked volunteers work for us? Some are already trying. Last year, Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo.com asked the site’s readers to in turn ask their members of Congress ,on the record: do you support Bush’s plans to privatize Social Security? A regular progressive organization would have needed a large, expensive staff to make the thousands of necessary calls—if, as non-constituents, they could have gotten responses at all. But by working together in a mass electronic barn-raising, Marshall’s thousands of readers got this critical information quickly and easily. Moreover, they had fun doing it and became more loyal to the site in the process. (TalkingPointsMemo.com is engaged in a similar project: do members support or oppose releasing a public version of the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.)

A similar dynamic may be creating new forms of journalism. Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net hopes to cultivate a large pool of volunteers able to, for instance, check for voting irregularities in every precinct in America. And Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson, the authors of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, worked with a network of amateur plane spotters to track secret flights around the world. As Paglen recently said, “When the plane-spotter community and journalists came together, it became one of the few ways to see the outlines of this program.”

More:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/02/01/armchair_activism_that_works.php