Ciencia, filosofía, religión y vida cotidiana

The other pattern that clearly emerged from the analysis of the NGO websites was the prominence given to media relations, one expression of which is the attention paid to galleries of press releases, promotional images and reports as well as the availability of contact details with press officers and key staff (Figure 40, Figure 19). It is striking that the press releases menu of FoE is given more priority on the homepage than the Get Involved section, while every campaign page has a dedicated media section with briefings, press releases and reports. One cannot overlook the paradox of NGOs using

NI Youth Forum

new media (which are supposed to by-pass gatekeepers) in order to approach “old media”, especially given that NGOs and activist groups have traditionally accused the media of misrepresenting their purpose and agendas to the general audience (Kenix 2007).

Similarly, in the case of the Make Poverty History campaign, we can conclude that the internet was used only partly as a tool of direct action (namely the Live 8 concerts and the various petitions); the primary focus of the sites was on the marketing and promotion of the cause and of the events. Gorringe and Rosie (2006) stress the importance of the media’s support in the case of the MPH campaign. They argue that MPH adopted broad and uncontroversial aims, depoliticised the issue of poverty and made use of celebrity endorsements, all of which helped gain the sympathy of journalists, which was crucial in promoting the campaign and differentiating between MPH and “rogue anarchist

elements”.

These practices may indicate that new social movements and grassroots organisations still largely depend on the mass media of the national public spheres to push their messages so that they can appeal to a critical mass of supporters; and that they are using the web as a way of catering for journalists’ needs – or as a follow up for citizens who initially access their message offline. This would concur with recent cases of online activist movements accumulating considerable online resources (donations,

subscriptions, attention) only to divert them to the mass media (e.g. in both US presidential election campaigns of 2004 and 2008, grassroots campaigners for the Democratic Party, such as MoveOn.org mobilised their online donor base in order to pay for TV advertising airtime during the Super Bowl – see Wolf 2004).

6.10 Emerging Repertoires of Online Mobilisation and Lack of User Awareness In this chapter we set out to examine the extent to which some of the UK’s main youth and non-governmental organisations are making use of the web’s potential so as to meet the emerging civic challenges. On the whole, and despite some instances of innovation and best practice, the websites analysed in this study do not appear to fully appreciate the fundamentally different nature of the internet to other mediums of communication and mobilisation; they often overlook the visual and emotional aspects of communication and do not avoid common pitfalls in terms of user awareness, information architecture and web design.

However, clear differences emerged amongst different groupings of cases. Institutionally-oriented youth sites (such as youth parliaments, forums and engagement projects) were found to lack participation incentives, meaningful tools, clear objectives and overall sense of purpose – a consistent picture to the one recently drawn by Ward (2008: 160) who argues that “youth organizations are aware of young people’s shifting political selves, but struggle to match this understanding with their aims and goals”. They were also plagued by usability problems such as inaccessible menus, broken links and elementary design.

Issue-oriented NGO websites are fundamentally different: they present a clear sense of purpose and a specific mobilisation agenda, are visibly slicker, more sophisticated and more comprehensive. However, variance was also observed within this grouping. On the one hand, websites such as Fairtrade and Make Poverty History were found to be more user-conscious, better designed and putting forward specific participation objectives and following these up with tangible outcomes, effectively combining style with substance in an accessible way. The Meatrix was an interesting case of a site building its message around a visually bold and culturally charged animation video. On the other hand, the websites of established environmental organisations, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, are richer in content but have not yet acquired a distinct visual identity and efficient site architecture.

A shift towards a consumerist paradigm of online civic participation was also evident to various extents amongst the NGO websites. This ranged from the encouragement of specific practices of consumption to linking political issues to everyday life to building web tools that are more market-oriented. Along with the preoccupation of NGOs with media relations, this trend is particularly interesting as it is further evidence of what Chadwick (2005) called “hybridization”, i.e. the borrowing and adaptation of online mobilisation repertoires that have been typically associated with political organisations, interest groups and new social movements, but are now becoming part of a much more fluid and dynamic online civic culture.

Still, our analysis concurs with Xenos and Bennett’s (2007: 52) observation that while digital media provide some promising means for the mobilisation of younger generations,

“a number of important elements of this terrain must still be negotiated if that potential is to be fully realised”. They found a “pattern of adaptation to the digital media environment that, while making important strides, appears to lag behind the efforts of other political [and, we would add, commercial] actors to capitalise on the network potentials of the Internet”.

This line of findings concurs with earlier studies of online mobilisation (e.g. Pickerill 2001, Jackson 2003) which had concluded that the use of the internet by political and civic actors was, at the time, “unimaginative”. It seems that little has changed since then, given also that the comparative analysis of our sample across time (2005/06 – 2008/09) did not produce evidence of significant shifts in online civic practice.

Recent studies on the production of youth and issue websites (Banaji 2008b, Ward 2008) are consistent with some of the emerging findings regarding the mobilisation approaches of youth web producers. They observed structured and strategic rather than creative and reflexive communication as well as a series of challenges facing these organisations, with funding being by far the greatest. Banaji argues that funding is

“an absolute key to survival of websites and organisations in this section Its effects cannot be over-emphasised for they range from those on the set-up of teams who manage and update websites to those on the ideological and political stances that websites feel that they can be seen to take in the public domain” (2008b: 151).

While the issue of resources is a crucial one – and it really does challenge continuing utopian discourses about the revolutionary impact of every new web application – some of the changes needed in order to cater for younger users’ needs are not always

resource-intensive. What is required instead is an understanding of the highly volatile and instrumental nature of citizens’ online and civic behaviour. Adapting to the medium’s nature, which, for better or for worse, is user-led, may well require prioritising needs, key messages and visual cues and – possibly – sacrificing some breadth and depth of content for a more engaging and efficient web design.

Having established the main approaches to online mobilisation by youth and issue websites, the following chapter focuses on a sub-sample of the issue-oriented websites examined here and presents our participants’ own responses to this material through an extensive user evaluation study. Gauging users’ own assessments of available online civic material is crucial in establishing these sites’ strengths and weaknesses, and essentially realising the extent to which these organisations are able to address young people’s online civic needs. The four websites chosen for that part of the study

(Fairtrade, Friends of the Earth, Soil Association and The Meatrix) represent comparable but slightly different approaches to online mobilisation, as they differ both in their visual design and in the articulation of their agendas.

Participant #2.11-BS: I think if people really can actually make a difference, like with voting… if you can vote on a website I’d probably be more inclined to actually go and think that I’m actually making a difference rather than just read and yet you’re thinking “ok…” – you know what I mean? So, I suppose it’s like… interacting with the… website.

Participant #2.10-AB: Yeah I’d like to know how… how… how it’s gonna make a difference, what I do… as well, that would be important. Sometimes you can just think “well… it’s just me on my own, what difference am I gonna make?”

Chapter 7