Dr. DigiPol

I recently gave an interview for Studio 1080 on KUDO in Anchorage, AK about using Twitter for advocacy/marketing and wanted to share it with you. Here is the gist of the conversation:
Why tweet?
In the US alone, there are 26.5 million people on Twitter and among them are many, if not most of […]

While for many the social web seems but a few years old, I have long argued that it has its roots in the pre-web internet. Not only have many of the key online organizing tools (email, chat, and discussion forums) been around since the internet was a text-only platform, but political and issue groups have been using them since those early days. By the late 1990’s, the web was well established and being used much as it is today on Facebook and Twitter, though with somewhat more primitive tools.

One of the more disturbing examples of early online social network organizing involves the Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist movement in the United States. In a 1998 essay by Milton Kliem, Jr. tactics that will seem all too familiar to today’s online organizers were spelled out to help the Aryan Resistance spread its message and recruit new followers.