Internet Campaigning Holding Power structures to a count
The question is how do you get the information you need for holding power structures to account? In most cases it is from other people. It's a co-operative endeavour that can now be conducted largely through internet.
It's an old wisdom that "It is not what you know, but who you know". People with power cultivate their well connectedness. It starts at public schools. We can and should do that too in order to operate as fully responsible world citizens.
Here's a few tips to develop your own inernet connectedness followed by some ideas as to how you might operate in your emerging network.
Developing your personal network:
1. Notice that at the end of many newspaper articles people leave their e mail address. If you have something of significance to say about their article, write to them and keep their e mail address in your e mail address book.
2. Get yourself a web site and advertise it on a search engine. Leave your e mail address on it. That's easy for academics.
3. Take people's e mail address when you meet them - that includes at professional conferences and people visiting from abroad.
4. When people send you circular letters they sometimes send the whole e mail list. If the list indicates a clear political sympathy feel free to dip in it as well - but only send speculative mail to strangers carefully and if they respond take up the relationship. Otherwise don't hassle.
5. Join e mail discussion groups on different topics. You get access to articles and ideas as well as making the acquaintance of new people when they leave their contact details.
6. At meetings circulate requests for e mail addresses too. When people send you articles and web references follow them up - they usually have e mail links too.
7. See if you can find old friends - e.g. That you knew many years ago. Sometimes they have gone abroad and can send you perspectives from a different viewpoint.
8. Sometimes you find that people who live locally, that you didn't know at all, have a mass of knowledge about things and may be following things on foreign web sites. Make sure you send them the things that interest them.
As a rule of thumb the more you send out, the more you'll get back. From my point of view it evolved over a couple of years after Sept 11th. It started just as a few people that I knew sending each other articles "cut and pasted" from newspapers and web sites, that they would be unlikely to notice, without being in the countries from which they came
Also make sure that you keep some personal contact with people now and then when they contact you personally. Not only is this polite you make new friends.
I have a web site, set up for me with the help of a web friend in Australia and a few people had written to me about articles on it over the last few years. After Sept 11th I noticed articles in Der Spiegel and elsewhere which said how badly the US was served by its mass media, and how badly informed they were. So I started sending articles from a variety of different viewpoints to people in the US and elsewhere. Many surprised the people concerned and they passed them on. They then started sending me things back that I found interesting.
As people get to know what you are doing they put you on their lists.
Build your own circle. Your interests will not be identical to mine. We do not all have to prioritise the same thing. Send your circulations out also via Bcc lists (blind carbon copy lists) That way you protect anonymity. (In Outlook Express click tools, then select recipients, then click in people from your address book in the Bcc box). Remember, however, when writing to officials and politicians you must come out publically and send your name and postal address. If youa re nervous about this think of it this way - if you are asking questions, what law are you breaking exactly?
With your web circle you can:
a. Regularly review the best alternative sites like Truth Out, Counterpunch, Znet, Indy Media etc and keep up a rolling international review of the news as seen by newspapers and agencies in different countries and cultures.
b. Jointly accumulate information about an issue important to you, develop your research on the issue and then use it to chase an official agency or government department on that issue sending copies to your friends and journalists. If you need to you can also research using search engines. There are lots of things that the powers that be would like to keep secret but they are too big to be kept under wraps. In the old days they got away with this because it was too time consuming to research an issue that one got a wind of. Now it's a relatively quick process to find out and send it out to lots of your friends.
c. Develop information about topics and use your information to feed journalists with leads to stories and background information.
d. Appeal to friends for help on particular issues, where they have more skills and knowledge than you in a particular field.
e. Save yourself the wind up experience of listening to/ watching the mass media as you can usually keep quite well up to date with most issues, in real time, via your friends, and via the up to date Reuters and other reports. (I rarely bother to listen to or watch the news on TV now. Newpapers important as supplementary material - however, they are usually a day later than internet info).
f. Above all it's possible to interpret, draw out and highlight the information that you feel is important, not leaving yourself in the hands of writers or editors in the radio or TV programmes to do the interpretation a way that winds you up because it curries favour with business and political interests.
g. Develop a data base of issues and references within your computer and those of your friends that can easily be recalled and reused as the need arises.
Wage Peace - Happy Hunting, of the Peaceful Kind!
Brian Davey (March 2003)