EMAIL LISTS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN OPEN AND MULTIFACETED IDENTITY

Abstract

Known for its internal plurality, the ‘movement for alternative globalization’ regularly comes together in events such as the European Social Forum (ESF), which are integral to the process of networking and cross-fertilization among its diverse participants. Yet apart from physical meetings, ‘alter-globalization’ activists also meet in a variety of online spaces. This article investigates the role of such spaces in the communicative process of collective identity construction by examining three email lists devoted to the organizing of the London 2004 ESF – a European list, a national and a national-factional. Considering collective identity formation as a communicative process, the article has focused on the design of the selected lists and the social context or ‘we’ that each one helped constitute. It also explored the communicative affordances of the lists for the process of collective identity formation by looking at bonding, trust-building and interactivity. The results show that depending on their purpose, accessibility and geographical scale, the email lists served as distinct but overlapping loci of collective identity. These settings displayed varying degrees of breadth and heterogeneity in terms of their themes and focus, their types of author, as well as the language in which messages were written. They also exhibited different degrees of interactivity with the factional list helping the formation of a cohesive collective identity for its members, while the European one allowed the emergence of a much looser, open and fragmented sense of the collective.

Keywords:

• email lists
• collective identity
• European Social Forum
• movement for alternative globalization

Notes

For Melucci, the word ‘identity’ alludes to a sense of permanence which does not suit the processual analysis that he is arguing for. He nonetheless uses the term for lack of a better one, noting that ‘it represents by definition a temporary solution to a conceptual problem, and should be replaced if and when other concepts prove themselves more adequate’ (1996, p. 70).

It is worth noting here that all interviewees were anonymized apart from Stuart Hodkinson, the creator of the democratisESF list.

Social forum politics have always been characterized by a tension between the culture of horizontal networking and the command-driven logics typifying the more traditional components of the Left. However, the London ESF organizing process was the first time this conflict became so explicit that the two opposing camps were named after the modes of organizing each one was supposedly pursuing (Nunes 2005, p. 298). According to many of my interviewees, the intensity of the clash can be partly attributed to the particularities of the British Left and its distinctive balance of forces, characterized by the powerful position of the SWP. One of the main lines of demarcation between the two camps referred to their different perceptions of the goals and purpose of the ESF. While the ‘Horizontals’ argued that the organizing of the forum should embody the participatory beliefs of the movement, the ‘Verticals’ insisted on the primacy of ‘strategic goals’, viewing the ESF as an event that, if successful, could lead to the emergence of a ‘mass movement’. The clash also derived from two opposing understandings of democracy, with the ‘Horizontals’ stressing the value of direct participation, while the ‘Verticals’ were more appreciative of representative structures.

In the results that follow, the total number of authors and the estimates of author overlap and message flows were calculated based on the total number of messages posted on each list. The remainder of the results refers to the 10 per cent random sample.

For 1 per cent of messages the language was not clear (this includes one empty message).

I estimated the flow of messages based on the subject line of the message. If the subject line included an indication that this message was forwarded to/from another list or was a reply from a message to another list, then it was counted in the flow of messages. For instance, the subject line ‘[esf-uk-info] Fwd: [FSE-ESF] about the European Assembly’ means that this message was initially forwarded to the FSE-ESF list and then sent to the esf-uk-info. Messages posted on two or three lists simultaneously were not counted as they did not move from one list to the other. However, if a subscriber, for instance, forwarded a message from one list to the next but altered the subject line, then obviously the subject line of the message would not indicate that this message was sent to both lists. Therefore, these figures may be actually underestimating the flow of messages between the three lists.

However, a point to note here is that if we take into account the per cents of total number of messages, then these differences seem nearly negligible. Lacking any other similar research, there is some difficulty to interpret these figures with certainty.