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Bart Bonikowski, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age By Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport The MIT Press. 2011. 272 pages. $32.77 cloth, Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 3, March 2015, Page e88, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sos160
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Debates about the social consequences of rapid technological change frequently oscillate between utopian optimism and obdurate skepticism, both of which tend to fare poorly against the tests of time and empirical evidence. In Digitally Enabled Social Change, Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport strive for the middle ground between such extremes as they investigate the consequences of Internet technology—and specifically the web—for social movement mobilization. The book's key insight is that the novelty of web-mediated protest depends on how well activists leverage the web's distinct affordances, including its ability to reduce the costs of mobilization and to enable asynchronous participation without the need for physical copresence. When the web's advantages are fully exploited, many of the processes perceived by social movement scholars as essential for movement success cease to matter and, as a result, the fundamental logic of protest is transformed. Under such conditions, collective action can be organized by individuals or small groups rather than formal organizations, participants can express their grievances in a matter of minutes and at a time and place of their choosing rather than in the context of geographically circumscribed collective events, and the pool of potentially relevant objectives and protest targets can expand beyond standard political claims aimed at the state.