Online/offline combination can maximise people power

by Günter Thauer

The Web offers lots of tools and instruments for citizen participation – from traditional email to the social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). For local, national and international campaigns, citizens are using platforms such as:

• Avaaz (‘the world in action’)
• Demokratie in Aktion
• Avanti Europe!

Initiatives such as right2water (‘Water is a human right’), which hopes to have collected 2m signatures by September, and the Avaaz Save the Bees campaign, on the way towards 3m signatures, have been highly successful, even on a European level.

Besides these big platforms there is a boom in local e-participation, such as Fix My Street, Frag den Staat (Ask the Government) and Parliament Watch.

Obvious recent examples of successful (at least in the short term) cyber-activism are the 2011 Tunisian and Egyption revolutions, where the Internet was used as an effective tool for successful critique, opposition and even revolution. However, the act of merely ‘saying something’ can be a force for change in repressive regimes; it’s not so easy in a democracy. As US activist Ralph Nader said, “the Internet doesn’t do a very good job of motivating action”, and he also noted that the US Congress, corporations and the Pentagon did not necessarily “fear the civic use of the Internet”.

We must, therefore, be realistic about e-participation tools. Digital participation has its limits, especially on its own. Facebook ‘likes’, ‘clicktivism’ (digital activism without real engagement or action) and even millions of signatures will achieve little without strong, ‘real world’ action.

An early example of effective online/offline campaigning was that by the Professional Contractors Group in the UK. In 1999, the British government introduced a new employment tax called IR35. An online trade association was set up to campaign against it. Within weeks, it had raised £100,000 through the Internet from people who had never even met. Within two years, they became a fully formed trade association with 14,000 members. They presented the first ever e-petition to parliament and organised one of the first flash mobs: a thousand people responded to their Internet call to join a protest to lobby Parliament. Later on they raised £500,000 via the Internet to fund a High Court challenge against the tax. This failed, but they secured a number of concessions.

The lesson is that e-participation tools can be very useful, but they must be combined with good old activism ‘on the streets’, at the gates of power, in the court, and so on.