The ‘popular’ culture of internet activism

Abstract

How does the internet contribute to changes in civic engagement in the USA? To answer this question we must examine the institutional context of US marketizing civil society and the cultures of good citizenship constructed online. Drawing upon the findings from a case study of ONE, a campaign targeting extreme poverty and the spread of AIDS, I demonstrate how the internet may function as a space of new divisions of labor between civil society organizational actors and lay activists. While organizational actors use Web 2.0 to make activism convenient and standardized, the public is asked to participate in what I term ‘visual labor’, creating and representing images of community online that legitimize the organization’s claims. At the same time, volunteer action is understood largely as performative. Ultimately, the article confronts the understanding of the internet as a post-bureaucratic democracy and emphasizes its cultural role in communicative capitalism.

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