Page 134 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Introduction 18:0
situation by itself, the story of a network of gay rights supporters backing
a sailor being drummed out of the Navy became newsworthy. Eventu-
ally, the New York Times and ABC’s World News Tonight covered the
story. According to Aravosis, the Internet permitted a few activists to
bypass the originally uninterested media outlets, creating public inter-
est without them. Once a threshold of interest was crossed, the media
took on the story. He says, “What’s new here is the ability to get the
message out without going through the [traditional] media. We were
able to get [McVeigh’s story] to thousands of people without ever calling
one print reporter.” 16 With only a little hyperbole, Wockner observes,
“In the old days, Activist A had to call Reporter B at Paper C and hope
that the editor was interested. That strategy used to take two weeks to
get anything out and only reached the readers of gay newspapers. The
Net has changed all that. Now it takes 10 minutes to reach millions.” 17
The effort failed to save McVeigh’s job at the Navy, but it demonstrated
how a group with few resources and essentially no organizational struc-
ture could place an issue on the national policy agenda, even if only
briefly.
The same year, the protests and violence at the 1999 Seattle meeting
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrated similar organiza-
tional dynamics. The far-flung collection of activist, labor, and student
groups that comprised the late 1990s antisweatshop movement oper-
ated through a decentralized network of electronic mail, chat rooms,
and eventually a web site dedicated solely to organizing for the protest.
They used these tools to recruit participants for Seattle, share infor-
mation, and coordinate activities. According to one participant during
the organizing phase, “Rightnow,everytimewedoanaction,wesend
out an e-mail and a hundred people show up. It’s like magic. We couldn’t
do it without e-mail.” 18 By one account, the genesis of the protests can
be traced to an electronic mail campaign initiated eleven months before
the WTO meetings, with a single message distributed by Public Citizens’
GlobalTradeWatch.FromthateventthroughthestreetprotestsinSeattle,
events had a self-organizing character independent of central planning
and finance. Protesters drew together from several nations a disparate

16
Quoted in Steve Friess, “Cyberactivism,” The Advocate, no. 780 (March 2, 1999),
p. 37.
17
Quoted in Steve Silberman, “Wiring the Gay World,” Wired, on-line edition, Aug. 5,
1998, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,14229,00.html.
18
Cited in B. J. Bullert, “Strategic Public Relations, Sweatshops, and the Making of a
Global Movement,” unpublished paper, Seattle University, May 18, 2000, p. 3.
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