THE UK ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT ONLINE

Abstract

This article uses interviews with committed anti-war and peace activists to offer an overview of both the benefits and challenges that social movements derive from new communication technologies. It shows contemporary political activism to be intensely informational; dependent on the sensitive adoption of a wide range of communication technologies. A hyperlink analysis is then employed to map the UK anti-war movement as it appears online. Through comparing these two sets of data it becomes possible to contrast the online practices of the UK anti-war movement with its offline ‘reality’. When encountered away from the web, recent anti-war contention is grounded in national-level political realities and internally divided by its political diversity; but to the extent that experience of the movement is mediated online, it routinely transcends national and political boundaries.

Keywords:

• anti-war movement
• Internet
• email
• hyperlink analysis

Notes

This article draws on the research project, Internet Activism: Anti-War Movements in the Information Age, carried out with Prof. Frank Webster and Dr Jenny Pickerill. The project was funded by the ESRC (RES-228-25-0060). Further information is available at http://www.antiwarresearch.info.

For a full discussion of the dangers of information overload and informational cocoons, and the strategies anti-war activists have developed to cope with them, see Gillan et al. (2008, ch.6).

Wiki technology is exemplified at www.wikipedia.org. Examples from the social forum movement include the alternative website of the third European Social Forum (http://www.altspaces.net), which was born from a critique of the non-inclusive nature of the event's official website and the Sheffield Social Forum Wiki (http://wiki.sheffieldsocialforum.org.uk) which has long outlived the existence of the group that set it up. Wiki technologies have been integrated into the ESF process through the collaborative website OpenESF (http://openesf.net).

For a description of the software project, see Rogers (2002). For examples of applications, see Rogers and Marres (2000).

‘In-links’ refers to the number of links that website has received from within the core of the network and is thus far lower than the total number of links that site receives.

The nineth ranking website appeared as ‘Locata’, which represented a generic web services company. However, examining the outgoing link data for key websites suggested that this was the result of redirects from another website that had recently ceased to exist.