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Social Movements 125

of new media technologies facilitates and alters social movement activity

today. In the first place, use of the Internet contributes to recruitment, to
publicizing social movement causes and activities. It also makes some
kinds of participation in a movement very easy; on the Internet, social
movement sympathizers may be just a click of a mouse away from joining
in an action by adding a name to an e - petition, or, with very little effort,
joining a discussion linked to a social movement website, blogging, or
posting pictures and videos. New media technologies also enable sharing
of knowledge about a movement ’ s concerns, expertise, and strategic
thinking to an unprecedented extent. The Internet can be used to dissemi-
nate information that is not covered, or that is actively suppressed, by the
mainstream media, so involving people who would not otherwise be
addressed by particular issues. And use of new media technology, includ-
ing mobile phones, also facilitates the organization of protest events,
enabling large numbers to coordinate their convergence at particular times
and places (Scott and Street, 2001 ). In this respect, the transnationaliza-
tion of movements is facilitated by cheap air travel, too. It is virtually
unimaginable that such large numbers of people should come together in
different cities around the world to protest at the G8 summits, for example,
before the Internet and cheap flights. Similarly, setting up the World Social

Forum as a global meeting place for activist discussions is unthinkable
without cheap forms of transport. In general, then, use of new media
technologies and cheap air travel enable the diffusion of social move-
ments, which was already going on across national borders, to be speeded
up and extended geographically. They make sharing frames of under-
standing, forms of organizing, and repertoires of action much easier and
quicker across wider geographical areas.

Collective i dentity
As we have seen, collective identity is a crucial aspect of social movement
activity. In fact, the formation of a collective “ we ” and its extension to
include those who are indifferent or opposed to “ our ” vision is the prin-
cipal political action of the movement. Social movements work by persua-
sion: making injustices or problems visible, creating knowledge and
persuasive arguments, and effectively constructing social reality in such a
way that ignoring those injustices or problems becomes impossible. In this
respect, and rather oddly perhaps, a social movement actually aims to
dissolve itself; it is successful when it becomes “ a way of seeing ” gener-
ally, rather than a bounded, if loosely networked, group of activists who
share a common perspective (see Rochon, 1998 ).