Consumer activism 2.0: tools for social change

Abstract

Consumer activism is important for the progressive evolution of society. Since the Boston Tea Party of 1773, North American history is replete with accounts of consumers using their collective power to spawn social change (Glickman 2005) including the enactment of consumer protection laws and adoption of socially responsible manufacturing standards. In recent decades, with the increasing global penetration of the Internet and its features that allow users to inexpensively create and disseminate information (DiMaggio et al. 2001), consumer activism reached a new height. Internet technology was instrumental in the establishment of China’s Falun Gong oppositional movement (Lin 2001), and the online-based myBarackObama.com campaign contributed to the success of President Obama’s successful 2008 presidential bid (Carty 2011). More recently, the Internet’s role in the 2011 democratic uprisings in the Middle East and the Occupy Wall Street movement attests to its power as a medium for mobilizing global citizens on behalf of various causes. Scholars in consumer behavior, communication studies, political science, and sociology havestudied numerous aspects of collective behavior, social movements, and resistance to political and societal ideologies through various theoretical lenses (e.g., resource mobilization, collective identity, and new social movements). However, there is a research gap due to limited consideration of the new Web 2.0 technologies and consumer-generated media (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and blogs) in consumer activism. Established organizations, such asAmnesty International (AI), now utilize social media and encourage consumers to “promote human rights online” by taking action through email, and displaying Amnesty’s banner on personal websites and blogs. In addition to Twitter, AI hosts five official Facebook pages for different activist groups and various country-specific web endeavors. On its 50th birthday, May 28, 2011, AI encouraged consumers to “celebrate 50 years of fighting for justice” by adding the Amnesty candle to users’ Facebook and Twitter profiles. The organization also posts images on Flickr, utilizes YouTube, and offers an AI iPhone application to help consumers act quickly on issues they care about. Utilizing current technologies, organizations such as Avaaz. org provide consumers with an easily accessible, online platform from which to participate in various activism efforts ranging from poverty elimination to climate change issues. Meaning “voice” in multiple languages, Avaaz.org empowers consumers to take online action by organizing “citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want” (www.avaaz.org). The issues pursued are selected through polling over 10 million members in 193 countries who, collectively, have taken 58,414,636 activist actions since the organization’s founding in 2007. Online engagement has certainly influenced the conduct of activism through connecting consumers to local and global issues, increasing the ease of action, and thus offering consumers the ability to participate in activism efforts to varying degrees. The aim of this chapter is two-fold. First, we offer an overview of contemporary onlineconsumer activism to better understand how consumers utilize Internet-mediated communications in their activism efforts. Second, we assess whether online activism has altered the nature of activism itself. Although we focus on consumer movements that drive social change through altering existing practices and dialog pertaining to consumption and marketing (Kozinets and Handelman 2004), social movements present the context for these behaviors. Additionally, two implicit premises underpin this chapter. First, while the Internet and Internet-based technologies are important as the facilitating medium for online activism, action on the part of consumers is just as important. As Earl and Kimport (2011, p. 14) write, “It is people’s uses of technology – not technology itself-that can change social process.” Second, we contend that every consumer is a potential activist because each individual’s consumption behaviors are statements of value.