Digital Activism: An Interview with Mary Joyce
March 9 2010, 1:42pm
Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and “use neutrality.” Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. “Use neutrality” means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digital_activism_an_interview_with_mary_joyce.php
