Social Movements 2.0
- Monday Dec 28,2009 04:28 PM
- By editor
- In Analysis and research
Source: The Nation
January 15, 2009
On September 27, 2007, the world experienced its first virtual strike. In response to a wage dispute, IBM workers in Italy organized a picket outside their company’s “corporate campus” based in the 3-D virtual world of Second Life. According to a report in the Guardian, workers “marched and waved banners, gate-crashed a [virtual] staff meeting and forced the company to close its [virtual] business center to visitors…. The protest, by more than 9,000 workers and 1,850 supporting ‘avatars’ from thirty countries,” included a rowdy collection of pink triangles, “sentient” bananas and other bizarro avatars.
While the strike was playful, it was also buttressed by careful planning and organization. Workers set up a strike task force, developed educational materials in three languages and held more than twenty worker strategy meetings. The hard work paid off. According to Christine Revkin of the UNI Global Union, which was involved in the strike, the online protest led to new negotiations and a better deal for the workers. Twenty days after the initial protest the Italian CEO of IBM, Andrea Pontremoli, resigned. (Here’s a video from the strike.)
Stories like this offer a glimpse into the powerful potential of the emerging Web 2.0 world, a place where workers and others use social networking tools to quickly reach across national and workplace borders, outflank bosses and politicians and wield collective power. But right now, the type of virtual solidarity seen in the IBM strike remains more promise than reality. People are willing to sign petitions, donate money, trade information and join in political discussions online, but translating these activities into solidarity built on trust and a willingness to take economic or physical risk on another’s behalf is exceedingly rare.
Civil society, Communication. Information society
One Response for "Social Movements 2.0"
Note: The Zapatista rebellion was largely based on use of technology, and virtual, so I think yo u really need to rethink your primary thesis….
But all good…
rrc
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