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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the ways in which two Internet-based civil society groups, Hasiru Usiru and Praja, negotiate online and offline spaces of collective action in Bangalore, India’s “IT City.” Based on ethnographic research, the study extends collective action theory through an examination of communicative interactions and experiences of urban civil society actors in a developing country. The paper highlight factors that impede and support collective actions, including attitudes toward the Internet as a tool for democratic engagement, ideological motivations, and perceptions of identity and membership, among others. Such a line of inquiry is significant in highlighting the possibilities of ICTs for collective action, while simultaneously avoiding the tendency to inflate and overestimate their capacity to produce social change.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. See Tilly and Tarrow (Citation2007) for a detailed explanation of claim-making.
2. Under Indian law (there are federal and state cooperative laws), a group of persons can form a cooperative society if they have a common objective (Business.Gov.In., Citationn.d.)
3. By September 2012, the city had recorded 267 pedestrian deaths for that year (Sastry, Citation2012).
4. A corporator is a member of the local municipal corporation, the BBMP.
5. Pseudonyms were chosen for respondents that were reflective of participants’ religious identities, but which would also avoid any inadvertent identity disclosure.
6. Lynch (Citation2014) and Nanabhay and Farmanfarmaian (Citation2011) describe the torrent of urban protests and social movement activity since 2010 as “spectacles,” amplified by the interconnectedness of digital and mainstream media.