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ABSTRACT
This study explored information and communication technology (ICT) uses for protest politics, focusing on the case of a 2008 protest in Korea. Based on a survey of citizen activists (N = 322), it examined informational and coordinative uses of eight different ICTs for protest participation. The results indicated that heavy, moderate, and nonprotesters were differentiated, particularly regarding the use of Web sites of social movement organizations (SMOs), mobile phone, and e-mail. Across all types of protesters, the portal site was the most prominently utilized tool, while online micromedia showed little contribution. The findings call for the reconsideration of the waning role of SMOs in contemporary protest politics, and the differentiation of the public-oriented ICT from the private use of ICT regarding its contribution to expand civil society.
Notes
1. Data are available at the Dataverse of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Havard University (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu)
2. For a detailed summary, see CitationKim (2009) and CitationHundt (2008).
3. Twitter was not considered in this study. At the time the survey was conducted, Twitter had not yet acquired its current popularity. In Korea, Twitter is still not a mainstream practice. Blogs and SNS items were presented together during the survey because SNS and blogs are integrated in many services in Korea.
4. Given the unequal sizes across heavy, moderate, and non-protester groups and the violation of assumption of homogeneity of variance (for Boxs M test, p < 0.001), Pillai's criterion was chosen for testing the significance instead of Wilk's Lambda criterion (CitationTabachnick & Fidell, 1996).