The record thus far is even more mixed on the second of these dimensions,
identity-building. The blogosphere, for example, remains reasonably polarized.
If we understand collective identity as, “an individual’s cognitive, moral, and
emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or
institution” (Polletta and Jasper 2001, 285), the relevant “we” for political
mobilization requires not only specification, but continual re-delineation
(Melucci 1995, 51). If new media allow or encourage citizens to adopt new
collective identities, we might expect patterns of collective mobilization to
shift accordingly.
Online communities hold out the promise of parameters significantly different
from those of real-world communities. In the Malaysian case, for instance,
such communities might meaningfully transcend boundaries of ethnicity
and religion, offering new possibilities for bridging persistent sociopolitical
cleavages. Not all new media allow or foster such innovation, however; some
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media forms encourage mere passive consumption; language constrains
participation in most; and some tend to knit already-formed clusters more
tightly together, even if they could potentially do otherwise. That said, it is the
possibility of new or newly-defined, mobilizable collective identities that make
new media especially important for more than straightforward information
access, and particularly for political change.
In some cases, too, new media may enable communities to emerge in
a way otherwise unlikely. The Malaysian (and regional) gay, lesbian, and
transgendered community offers a good example. The community has gained
coherence and voice through vibrant online forums, beginning with earlier
tools such as IRC (internet relay chat) and listservs, then extending to websites,
blogs, professionally-run news and networking sites such as the Singaporebased
Fridae.com, and even the recent proliferation of affirming “It Gets
Better” YouTube videos (which spread rapidly from the US to global viewers
and producers). Given factors from homophobia and “closeting,” particularly
among Muslims in Malaysia, to the vagaries of geography, this community
would almost certainly be less cohesive, supportive, and empowered if not for
new media activism.
Lastly, the role of new media in mobilization is ultimately most salient in
assessing the potential of emergent tools to change political behavior. It is
here that we see most clearly the links—potential or real—between new
media and social movement campaigns, in terms of networking, recruitment,
agenda-setting, and concrete action. This category is tethered to the others:
bloggers, for instance, gain followers through information dissemination, may
forge newly-defined communities, and may take physical action by joining
protests, running for office, or other activities. The potential for new media
in transnational networking, including in terms of “boomerang effects” by
which activists in one country lobby their own government to press a more
repressive other government to reform (Keck and Sikkink 1998) fits within this
category, as well.
Still, internet use need not augment political participation. In the US, for
example, with its comparatively free media, data suggest that internet use
does not predict or increase political participation at all (although some of the
same factors that predict internet usage also predict political participation).
Even those who purposefully pursue political information online are no more
likely to vote than otherwise-similar others (Bimber 2001, 61-2). Even so, given
that providing or obtaining critical information is so much more inherently