Thinking Globally, Eating Locally: Website Linking and the Performance of Solidarity in Global and Local Food Movements

Abstract

It has become trite to observe that the Internet is allowing communities to spring up across distances that previously prohibited the timely sharing of experiences and strategies of advocacy. New communication technologies may aid the practice of frame alignment that social movements have always engaged in, but they may also highlight the dilemma between local and global forms of action. For example, food scandals continue to provoke varied and sustained public outcry, but are solutions to food provision problems conceived similarly at the local and the global level? Under the assumption that message makers use new media to perform and represent ideological sympathy explicitly, this paper looks at organizations facilitating the consumption of local food, compares their linking practices with those of organizations that actively oppose globalized agriculture, and describes the way local/global distinctions are implied, or performed, on the World Wide Web. It identifies a disparity between global rhetoric and local engagement (the globals don't go local) and shows that website linking highlights global/local discontinuities (the locals don't go global). The disparity could be a consequence of ‘ideological baggage’ (Johnson, 2000) in each organization. The appeal to get involved focuses on creating protest and opposition, but alternative ways of engaging in the food system – apart from the promotion of organic agriculture – are not facilitated. The organizations studied here include international environmental, consumer, and social justice movements as well as local food organizations in the USA and the UK.