New Media and Internet Activism: From the 'Battle of Seattle' to Blogging

Since the 1990s, there have been growing discussions of internet activism and how new media have been used effectively by a variety of political movements (Best and Kellner, 2001; Couldry and Curran, 2003). The early adoption and successful use of the internet in the early 1990s by the indigenous EZLN Zapatista movement in the Chiapas region of Mexico quickly dramatized how new media and grass roots progressivism might synergize, excite the world, and challenge status quo culture and politics (Best and Kellner, 2001). Activists who were already deploying the internet as a technology for organizing and communicating in digital hubs such as The Well, quickly drew upon the Zapatista’s imaginative use of the internet to begin broadcasting and tailoring their own messages to an emerging global audience. In the late 1990s, such activists began employing the internet to foster affiliations and stage events against the excesses of neo-liberalism and transnational corporate capitalism. Beginning with the 18 June 1999 ‘Carnival Against Capital!’ demonstration that covertly organized hundreds of thousands of protesters (including labor, environmentalist, feminist, anticapitalist, animal rights, anarchist, and other groups) throughout the world to demonstrate in new found solidarity, the Carnival continued with the infamous ‘Battle for Seattle’ against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999. Thus, an international protest movement surfaced in resistance to neo-liberal institutions and their related globalization policies, while democracy, social justice, and a better world were championed. Since then, broad-based, populist political spectacles have become the norm, thanks to an evolving sense of the way in which the new media & society