Page 189 - The Resilient Organization

176 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

from visitors to keep the video active on the site, and several Dean
supporters also agreed to host the video on their own Web sites as a
means of sharing the high-volume traffic. The next week, the video was
played by ABC News as an account of “what really happened” the
night of Dean’s infamous scream. Despite the news interest, the official
campaign apparently made the decision not to respond, based on the
view that any response would keep the original incident in the news. Or
perhaps the campaign, by then, had lost its determination to fight.

OBSERVATIONS ON ORGANIZING AND DIGITAL MEDIA

What can be learned from the Dean campaign that is relevant beyond
political organizing?
First, digital media are making the creation and sustenance of special-
purpose organizations more affordable. Prior to the mainstream conver-
gence of computing and communications technologies (that is, with the
popularization of the Internet in 1993 and 1994), there was a claim that
people with few institutional resources should not start organizations as
they cannot sustain them and that these organizations would therefore
become exploited by existing organizations that are powerful and resource-
ful (Piven & Cloward, 1979; Conell & Voss, 1990). Today, we see digital
media facilitating the emergence of low-cost organizations that are created
to serve social movements or special interests on their own terms. Digital
media technologies are known to reduce the communication and coordina-
tion costs of organizations, as the associated tools and infrastructure them-
selves become more pervasive and affordable (for example, Malone, 2004).
In addition, digital media further empowers individuals and small groups to
create (digitally enabled) organizations that are capable of reaching nonlo-
cal sources of support to ensure critical size.
Second, serendipity (or luck) plays a role. In many respects, the Dean
campaign fortuitously benefited from digital technologies that were
publicly available and preadaptive (that is, they could be crafted or cus-
tomized with little cost). Available digital media technologies (blogging
software) facilitated the creation of Howard Dean interest groups that