From clicktivism to hacktivism: Understanding digital activism

Abstract

Digital activism provides new opportunities for social movement participants and social movement organizations (SMOs). Recent IS research has begun to touch on digital activism, defining it, exploring it, and building new theory to help understand it. This paper seeks to unpack digital activism through an exploratory literature review that provides descriptions, definitions, and categorizations. We provide a framework for digital activism by extending Milbrath's (1965) hierarchy of political participation that divides activism into spectator, transitional, and gladiatorial activities. Using this framework, we identify ten activities of digital activism that are represented in the literature. These include digital spectator activities: clicktivism, metavoicing, assertion; digital transitional activities: e-funding, political consumerism, digital petitions, and botivism; and digital gladiatorial activities: data activism, exposure, and hacktivism. Last, we analyze the activities in terms of participants, SMOs, individuals who are targeted by the activity, and organizations that are targeted by the activity. We highlight four major implications and offer four meta-conjectures on the mechanisms of digital activism and their resulting impacts, and reveal a new construct where participants digitally organize yet lack an identifying cause, which we label connective emotion.