On Dec. 21, 1995 a hacker group calling itself Strano Network staged what is credited as one of the first virtual sit-ins to protest various policies of the French government. The group coordinated through mail lists and conducted a one-hour denial of service attack against government Web sites. By most accounts, the group was successful at denying service to most of these sites. The age of Electronic Civil Disobedience had begun.

There are obvious common themes to virtual protests:

* Logistics. There are none, at least in the traditional sense of protesting.

* Signage. There are no signs to be made, no flyers to be printed.

* Numbers. The organizers didn’t have to find protesters; they put the information on the net and let the people find them. In other words, they crowdsourced protesters. Since no one had to leave their home, they were both anonymous and safe.

* Arrests. There couldn’t be any police action involved in a protest where no one showed up, at least in the physical world.

From the early tools such as FloodNet, which automatically reloads the targeted Web site and listserv to the current use of Googlebombs, blogs and email campaigns, the Internet has made protesting faster, cheaper, and safer. And all without anyone actually having to be there. Recent examples even take place in Second Life.

As we move forward in a Web 2.0 world, we find every industry wanting to change and adapt. But even as early as 1999 the most basic and fundamental form of civic participation was transformed. We can’t dump tea in the ocean, but engaged citizens can make their voice heard online. As citizen journalists learn to organize online to establish networked journalism, perhaps some lessons can be taken first from networked protesting.

Examples from History

In 1999, Web retailer etoys.com filed suit against Swiss art site etoy.com for trademark dilution. Nearly 1,800 cyber activists rose to the cause of etoy by participating in an email campaign against etoys.com and their suppliers and setting up protest sites. The protest was successful in bringing media attention to the cause with more than 300 articles appearing in such mainstream media outlets as CNN, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. In January 2000, etoys.com dropped their suit and agreed to reimburse etoy $40,000 in legal fees. Clearly a victory for virtual protesting, although much of this may have been due to the relative novelty of the situation. This was after all 1999 and mainstream media was enamored with the online world. It’s also questionable whether the 1,800 protesters were concerned about protecting etoy.com, or were merely toy company competitors of etoys.com looking to kick the site while it was down.

Another example of the virtual protest is the Googlebomb. Once seen as just a prank, the lead up to the 2006 midterm elections saw it evolve into an organized political protest. The political blog MyDD.com began “the Googlebomb Project” to recruit other bloggers to link the name of a Republican candidate to a somewhat less than favorable Web site. Of the 52 candidates targeted, 36 wound up with the article chosen by MyDD.com on the first page of results. And who can forget the “miserable failure Google Bomb? While the bloggers were, for the most part, successful at getting their point of view to the front page of Google, it is unclear exactly how much of an impact this had on the midterms. After all, no one was conducting exit polls asking how much a search engine had effected the voting habits of the constituency.

A more recent example that met with come success surrounded the 2004 Twin Cities transit workers strike. In March 2004 the Twin Cities Transit workers went on strike. For a month, Minneapolis and St. Paul went without public transportation. On April 7, Minnesota based blog Blogumentary issued a Blog Action Alert urging readers to call Governor Pawlenty and insist he settle the strike. The Alert was picked up by several other blogs spreading the Alert through the blogosphere. On April 12, Governor Pawlenty returned to the bargaining table and a new contract was ratified on the 16th.
In this case, the blog campaign was no doubt a large part of the success of the phone campaign that coerced Governer Pawlenty back to the table, but it was also part of a larger scene where hundreds of people showed up to march at rallies and traditional protests.

This appears to be the direction that virtual protesting is heading; augmentation of the more traditional methods of protesting. It’s the best of both worlds. The speed, low cost, and ease of a virtual protest coupled with the physical bodies in the street that make for good television.

This has been put to extremely good use many events. Take for example the 2003 visit of President Bush to the UK. When news of his visit became public, the Web site interwebnet.org started the “Chasing Bush” campaign. The plan was to get people into the areas Bush had set up for planned PR photo ops and simply get in the picture with their back turned so that mainstream media could not use the images.
The news was spread via blogs and sms and those were the same tools that the people on the scene used to report the progress of the Bush tour as well as post reports and upload their own images. The plan was working so successfully that there was speculation that entire sections of London would have cell coverage disrupted to thwart the campaign. While this didn’t happen, the campaign had clearly caught the attention of the authorities.

Possibly the best well known hybrid protest was the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Again, the weapons of choice were blogs, email, and sms to coordinate the physical presence that gained worldwide media attention.

With our increasingly connected world, how easy is it to participate in some type of protest? It may be easier to decide to protest than to decide which group warrants your attention. Want to protest the genocide in Darfur? A quick Google search will return a good number of sites and blogs offering various means of participating. Want to donate money? There’s a site for that. Want to email your congressman? Check. Even if you want to take part in a march there’s a Web site or blog that can hook you up. Now a good rage against the machine is as simple as opening a browser window.

——

Mike Perkins is a Project Manager/IT manager for a general contractor. He is a big racing fan and blogs at Perkonis.