Thursday, February 28, 2008
Movement and Media, Chadwick
In the article it said that, "repertoires reflect the organization's values, and the 'medium is the message.'" Well in that sense, I can see the internet affecting organizations in terms of mobilization power, recruitment and especially in the formation of grassroots interest groups, PAC's, etc. I wonder about the effect of the television on these organizations as compared to the effect the internet has on them now.
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I think that the organizations themselves still see television as a useful tool (at least at the time when this article was written). The example I thought of while reading your post was the one about the MoveOn mass bake sale, "Bake Back the White House," which combined Internet fundraising and planning with actual action taken by half a million Americans on a single day. Over $750,000 was raised that day for John Kerry's presidential campaign. Chadwick takes care to note that "in keeping with the hybrid type, it also funded hundreds of traditional television advertisements" (295). I think it is telling that a successful website like MoveOn, which is based on the technology and methods of the networked information age, chose to fund television ads with the money that was raised. I wonder, however, if MoveOn would make that same choice today. Even though it is only a few years later, I think MoveOn would be able to come up with new options and ways to invest money in a campaign today, since campaigns and technology have changed so much. It will be interesting to see how the money is used this time around. Will MoveOn still have faith in traditional methods like TV ads now that YouTube has become so powerful?
I believe that organizations such as MoveOn and other "hybrid organizations" will continue to use TV advertising, at least in the foreseeable future. The majority of voters are more likely to watch TV than surf YouTube looking for political advertisements or information about a political supplied by a group other than the politician's own campaign. This is not to say that the internet and sites such as YouTube will not be a primary source for political advertisements and information in the long-run, just not now in the 2008 campaign.
What about Chadwick's argument that parties, interest groups, and social movements are blending together. Is the Environmental Defense Fund's transformation the wave of the future or an exception?
I think that the Environmental Defense Fund's transformation is the wave of the future because those kinds of transformations drastically cut costs for organizations and the goal of gathering and spreading information and recruiting affiliate members is commendable, effective and easy to do with the internet. There is certainly something to be said for increasing awareness and getting people involved, especially when it comes to presidential campaigns and promoting certain interests. Chadwick describes a situation in 2001, where Environmental Defense was able to target specific groups of members to lobby the White House in protest of new proposals on carbon dioxide emissions. 8,000affiliate members were chosen to lobby for the group. None of those 8,000 would have helped the cause (in this more traditional way) had it not been for the transformation to a hybrid grassroots organization. This success is paralleled in the MeetUp example and in the presidential campaigns today. I think the hybrid organization is an effective way of accomplishing goals and as the more traditional groups(political parties and interest groups) see how effective these methods can be, they will pursue similar transformations. While I can definitely see a down side to using only information age methods or only traditional methods, I do not see many negatives to combining the two to produce these hybrid organizations. I think that it is often a matter of weighing one side more than the other to achieve the balance necessary for your group to be successful, but I think that some kind of fruitful balance can eventually be reached for most traditional groups.
Jenna, while EDF's umbrella organization has transformed substantially, the entire environmental movement has been behind the curve on this entire movement. Their Environmental Justice arm, EarthJustice, has a barely-functioning web strategy (though they do have a beautiful, if largely content free site). Partially that's due do ideological clashes, seeing technology and human growth as encroachments on "pristine undisturbed nature" (though for more on the ideology of the environmental movement, take a look at the Breakthrough Institute), and partially due to organizational deficiency.
I'm far more excited about simple, powerful tools that allow small groups and organizations to achieve hybrid-like efficiency, operating as small, grassroots groups, but giving them the ability to operate like a large lobbying organization.
I'm a member of a group called Free Culture, an online activist group. Several months ago, I got an email from them about the Higher Education Reauthorization act, and they wanted members to mobilize and contact their congress members about it. Upon speaking with some friends at the top of the organization, I realized they had no idea how to go about actually lobbying while making an impact. If they called, they would only matter as a constituent (and only then as a tally on the intern's call sheet), and if they wrote, their message would be responded to by an intern in a few days, far after the bill had gone through the procedural point at which we could stop it. I gave them a primer on lobbying, and how to make an impact as a nonconstitient, who to speak to in each member's office on each issue, etc.
When they ended up phonebanking to contact these individuals, they found there was no easy way to do it, Fred Benenson created Committee Caller, a tool for individuals and small grassroots groups to contact core individuals inside congressional offices in a targeted, intelligent manner. This tool, and others like it (designed for small grassroots groups) let small groups behave like large organizations while still maintaining their core individual, bottom-up value set.
I agree with Jacob in that the internet and YouTube simply can not match the audience that television can cover. The is the digital divide that shuts a valuable demographic of voters out from viewing these videos, because of this division "hybrid organizations" simply cannot afford to take their focus off of television as the voting demographic that uses the internet and YouTube does not have the proven track record to substantiate such a move. Although certainly as the use of the internet increases and the digital divide lessens the internet will rise, it provides a superior venue to reach voters on a personal level, unfortunately that level simply isn't there yet.
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