Inside the Digital Anti Establishment

Marcia Stepanek is a journalist, new media strategist, NYU professor and an award winning news and features editor. Her upcoming book is "Swarms: the Rise of Digital Anti‑Establishment.
 

Eric:  Tell us about yourself.
 
Marcia:  I have been covering the intersection of technology and its impact on society and business, for pretty much the past 25 years. I did a new media fellowship at Stanford and went out there all primed from Hearst Media in Washington to cover the shrinking middle class in America and the increasing division between the haves and have‑nots.
Instead, when I got out to Silicon Valley everyone said, "Are you crazy?" [laughs] "We are in the middle of Silicon Valley, and there's a revolution happening here." Certainly, there was at the time I was out there with the rise of e‑commerce and with the rise of technology.
 
I switched my entire curriculum in order to study the impact of communications and new media technology and the law on business, on technology itself, and on the way people advocate for social change. Even back then, we saw the center of power moving from the center of establishment organizations to outside the organizations.
 
The evolution and implications of that happening, as you well know, has been going on for over a decade and is still continuing.
 
Eric:  You had to shift from class warfare to digital revolutions.
 
Marcia:  Often, they're the one and the same.
 
Eric:  Now you've got this book coming out about digital swarms, which talks about digital swarms becoming even more powerful and more sophisticated.
 
Marcia:  It's more about how networks and communities have been evolving and scaling. As they mature, a more sophisticated and permanent presence is created. We're seeing a lot of people organizing themselves into networks. Certainly this is also occurring politically around various interest groups. It also occurs in more of these informal communities and around communities of political interest.
 
In many ways, we have seen them start to exercise their muscle. I'm not talking so much about the Arab Spring.  I'm not talking about all of that.  I'm talking, now, about a communities ability to organize very rapidly as accountability networks.
 
For example, a couple of years ago, the Komen Foundation, a foundation that was dedicated to fighting breast cancer, made some controversial decisions.  The organization did not communicate these decisions very transparently or openly with so many of its supporters  In fact,  it started trying to dissuade people when they found out about some of the decisions that were being made, from commenting. This kicked up an angry swarm among supporters who, over the course of three days, were not only were able to hold some of the leaders of the Komen Foundation accountable for those decisions, but wouldn't stop organizing around this until some of the leadership had in fact been changed.
 
We've seen this repeatedly. We've seen this when people get angry at Rush Limbaugh, or get angry at any number of incidents. We saw this with the Stop SOPA campaign.
We can see communities organized very quickly to achieve something, a singular goal, very rapidly and very clearly.  All in the course of a week or less. These aren't accidents. This basically show that these networks have matured and that they're pretty consistent. They don't organize overnight. They don't always express themselves, but when they have a reason to do so, they can. That's what a swarm is.  We're going to see more of that. It's about not so much about the toppling of establishment organizations, but like sand against limestone we see the corrosion,  the uncomfortable reshaping of the status quo.
 
Eric:  You've been looking at this space for a long time, and you have some perspective here. Let me give you my take, my uninformed take compared to yours, of what I see with these digital swarms. To me, it seems like they lack stamina.
 
You see people organize around these flash points, around these wedge issues, around these issues that they're emotionally invested in. Then when it comes to the drudging work of something like policy‑making, they seem to dissipate.
 
I'm thinking about Egypt, for example. When it came to organizing to overthrow the Mubarak regime, everybody had their hand in that. When it came to the hard work of organizing behind parties and changing the political landscape, it didn't seem like people really had the stamina for that.
 
I also think about the type of responses I get from my social networks to issues that are serious. I'll post once in a while about an issue like climate change or net neutrality, and honestly, it doesn't seem like people have a lot of patience for that type of stuff unless it's really some sort of a flash point. Is that your perception? Am I missing something?
 
Marcia:  I don't think it's about stamina. I think there are permanent accountability networks. I do think that, yes, if it gets to a flash point, you're going to be there, and I'm going to be there.  In a lot of cases, I'm not just going to be online. I'm going to be out in the street, as well. We saw this, again, with Stop SOPA. We've seen it on small‑scale actions.
We've seen it in neighborhoods who are organizing. We've also seen it evolving out of so much of the crisis. We look at organized neighborhood groups, like IOB and other things that are basically organizing themselves as permanent accountability networks around a very singular goal. In IOB's case, to build park space out of urban blight in Brooklyn.
I think pieces like that represent the transformation of some of these flash‑in‑the‑pan anger groups that are permanent organizations. Most of this works very well on a local scale.
There's always been the challenge of moving people from online to offline action.
 
There's always been the challenge of, for lack of a better term in the nonprofit sector, transforming people from "click‑and‑givers" to actually rolling up their sleeves and attending the walk. [laughs] Attending the fundraising events and so on and so forth.
 
So much of this is still in transition from getting people and more inclusive voices to be organized and to see that they can have a say. And then strategically figuring out how to organize not only keeps people engaged, but keeps them engaged across multiple platforms, including face‑to‑face engagements.
 
We're seeing some groups doing this better than other groups. Chiefly, I am impressed with this area, and I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about, a lot of feminists with the small f networks. We're seeing a lot of women organizing online, in very effective ways, and in ways that create offline engagements as well.
 
We're also seeing it in the neighborhood, as I just mentioned, of IOB. We're also seeing it in certain pockets of students working for long‑term change around educational reform.
There are some areas that are doing it well and some areas that are doing it not so well.
 
To the extent that there is no such thing as viral...