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17 2 Is the Internet Creating New Reasons to Protest? Social movement scholars have been wary of granting the Internet transformative political power.To be sure, the Internet and other digital technologies have changed the form and probably the amount of protest. Movement scholars have documented activists’ use of cell phones, e-mail, text messages, chat rooms, blogs, and Twitter to mobilize rapid and massive demonstrations in places as far-flung as Maldova, Iran, and China. New digital technologies have made possible novel tactics of protest such as culture jamming and hactivism (Lievrouw 2006; Van Laer and Van Aelst 2009); new forms of mobilization such as smart mobs (Rheingold 2002) and networked affinity groups (Juris 2008); and new targets such as advertisers and corporate brands (Lievrouw 2006; Micheletti and Stolle 2008). Digital mobilizing tools have undoubtedly affected the supply of protest, to use Klandermans’s (2004, 360) phrase. But when it comes to accounting for the demand for protest, social movement scholars have been cautious. The Internet only “amplifies existing impulses and forces” (Bakardjieva 2009, 102); it does not produce them. “Yes, activists adopt new technologies when those technologies serve their purposes,” Charles Tilly wrote in 2006, “but purposes override techniques” (42; see discussion in Earl et al. 2010).1 In this chapter, we ask whether new digital technologies are also creating impulses, forces, and purposes. Is the Internet fostering new identities, new grievances, new stakes in protest, and/or new terrains of contention? Is it contributing not only to the supply of protest but also to the demand for it? We argue that it is. When thousands of Chinese visited a website to register their opposition to Google’s Chinese name change, they were motivated by Francesca Polletta, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, Beth Gharrity Gardner, and Alice Motes polletta, chen, gardner, and motes 18 an issue that did not exist before the rise of the Internet (Yang 2009). The impulse to protest restrictions on online gaming time obviously did not exist before online gaming. These may seem minor changes. Other changes, however , are further reaching. We focus on two whose importance lies in part in the fact that they force us to rethink two assumptions that have underpinned theorizing about movements. One is that protest is hard work; the other is that protest requires moving issues and people from the private sphere to the public. With respect to the first, the Internet has transformed the typical calculus of individual participation. Participation has become easier—as easy, in some cases, as pressing a button. We explore the consequences of that development for our understanding of mobilization. Among them, we suggest that standard models centered on the mobilizing role, variously, of collective identity and friendship may be off the mark. Friendship in the Facebook era may mobilize less by levying emotional obligations on intimates to participate and more by providing information to weakly linked acquaintances. It may, moreover, produce not just the motivation to act on one’s interests but the interests themselves. Collective identity, for its part, may be politically effectual, even if transient or centered on consumption choices, and more powerful by being virtual. To some extent, the lower costs of mobilization on their own have changed the issues on behalf of which people mobilize. But new digital technologies have also altered the relations between the public and private in ways that have produced whole new classes of contentious issues. This is the second development, or set of developments, we want to discuss, as we turn from the motivations behind people’s participation to the goals on behalf of which they participate. We are not the first to note that consumption has become a major site of contemporary contention. The Internet has contributed to that shift, in part by making consumption-based activism easier and by rendering corporations more vulnerable to such activism. But we focus on how the prominence of Internet technologies in people’s lives, and especially in the lives of young people, is creating new perceptions of the sociopolitical context (Klandermans, chapter 1). The Internet is creating new notions of privacy and entitlement and new boundaries between the realms of consumption and politics. In particular, the Internet may be destabilizing ideas about intellectual and artistic production that have long held the status of common sense. As a result, young people may perceive laws around copyright more as an immediate and mobilizing threat than as one more front in a long-running battle for radical artistic freedom...

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