So far I have avoided bringing up specific events and breaking stories here even when they might illustrate relevant uses of digital media. The reason for this is that I’m not really a reporter, but I’ve been watching something play out over the Internet and it is just too interesting to pass up. I’m talking about the recently declared and currently unfolding “War on Scientology” that is being led by an online group called “Anonymous.” It is a really fascinating case study of how current technologies and information dissemination via digital media can snowball into something that actually results in real world action.
I’ll supply background in case you find the story gripping, but this post is really about what digital media systems should facilitate in physical communities. A careful observer will also notice that the “war” involves many of the concepts being discussed on the IdeaLab. For instance: discrepancies between mainstream and independent news coverage, digitally coordinated action across the world, utilization of user driven systems, issues of credibility, and the relevance of specific physical location.
The Background
I’ll try to summarize things as quickly as possible, but it’s all rather complicated so bear with me! Also keep in mind that I heard about this the same way a lot of people did – Digg, YouTube, Google, and some scattered mainstream Media coverage – so there may be holes in the story.
Around January 16th 2008 some part of a back-alley online community titled Anonymous (aptly named because it is composed only of nameless members – they have no pseudonyms, aliases, or digital identities) decided that they were frustrated with the way The Church of Scientology has handled itself as an organization. They decided to try to do something about this frustration and pulled out the digital battle drums – which I assume involved a post on their community’s site announcing the problems with Scientology and looking to see if anyone wanted to help do something about it.
On January 21st someone uploaded a video to YouTube which ominously listed Anonymous’ complaints and announced an Internet led “war” on the Church of Scientology (note the 2 million + views). Because Anonymous is anonymous I can’t even try to guess how many people were involved at this point, but apparently it was enough to cause a decent amount of online buzz.
The message was spread through various channels of the Internet – YouTube, Digg, online community forums, etc. They also got a blip or two on the mainstream media radar. The interesting part is that efforts weren’t being organized by “leaders” – they were being organized completely via anonymous individuals using a public wiki, meaning anyone could change anything (much like you see on Wikipedia).
Over the next few weeks members of Anonymous began to harass Scientology and continued to make the occasional “press release”. More importantly, though, vloggers, bloggers, and countless other individuals gave their two cents through response videos on YouTube, comments on Digg, and contributions to the blogosphere. Some supported the movement, some just felt it was going to be interesting to watch, and some condemned Anonymous as misguided “cyber-terrorists”, unscrupulous, or simply boring; however it seemed their cause was resonating with people, generating attention, and even starting to be discussed outside of the Internet.
At this point a few more Internet-focused mainstream media folks took notice and mentioned it in various segments. Known critics of the Church of Scientology like Mark Bunker also chimed in and offered advice and criticisms of the anonymous efforts. After listening to the Internet response and gaining support, the anonymous digital harassment changed to legal, more traditional methods. Someone else uploaded a video to YouTube announcing plans for international protests on February 10th.
For me these “real life” protests, where 6000+ people protested in 70+ different cities around the world, are what pushed this whole debacle from “interesting to watch” to “what can we learn from this”. This takes us to today, where another round of protests is being planned for March 15th.
One of Anonymous’ forums has a compiled list of links to local and national news coverage. I would definitely recommend watching some of the news reports if you want to learn more.
Key Success Factors
That’s the story as I’ve seen it, so the question to ask now is how did they do it? How did a fairly small group of completely anonymous individuals manage to generate several million views worth of buzz on the internet? And finally, how did they actually bridge the gap and apply that buzz into real, physical world protests? Thinking about it may help inspire thoughts about where digital media is now, where it can go, and what would improve it.
Although there were plenty of things that could have gone better, here are some components that I think had a lot to do with how Anonymous was able to bring their movement to where it is today:
- Community-driven issues. Anonymous was a previously established community (albeit a non-traditional one) and its members were able to identify this issue as one that they had a passion for. Compare a community issue to one that is loosely backed by otherwise unrelated individuals and you will see why this matters.
- Effective targeted digital communication tools. User media sites allow for quick information dissemination to exactly the type of people that Anonymous wanted reach – active members of The Internet community. Those sites let others join in by participating in the conversation, passing the word along, or simply learning more on their own/taking some sort of personal action. Public wikis and forums also helped by supporting coordination and made it possible for anyone to propose and organize action.
- Tacit understanding of those tools and their potential. Anonymous was familiar with the existing digital media infrastructure (Digg, YouTube, community forums, etc.) and could use it effectively to get their message out.
- Attention and responsiveness to community feedback. Organizers and communicators adapted and listened to their audience; feedback shaped the movement. You can see a clear shift in Anonymous’ direction in response to audience members’ comments late January. Had Anonymous simply continued on as it began (i.e. through illegal harassment), it is unlikely that the group would have gained much/any worldwide support and I definitely wouldn’t be writing this post right now.
- Availability of information (to enable critical analysis). There is a lot of content from all perspectives scattered around the internet, so curious parties could look into things on their own using the glories of Google. I’m sure some people may have joined in without checking other sources, but more cautious media consumers had the resources needed to develop personal opinions before getting involved.
Lessons and Observations
I remember Knight Foundation representatives specifically saying that digital communities don’t need our help, which is why News Challenge applicants were required to focus on the physical. I think the Anonymous story illustrates how right they were, but why is it true? What is the functional difference between a physical community and digital communities such as the Diggers, the YouTubers, or Anonymous?
Both types of community have services that allow me to get an understanding of “the vibe”. The main difference here is how effectively it is done (i.e. how powerful and usable are the information systems). I have talked about this a little bit in the past; in fact, a fair chunk of my posts to this blog have simply about making systems that serve physical community news more sophisticated and accurately targeted.
Assuming I can get “the vibe” from some sources, how accurate is it? Ideally the local newspaper has made an effort to ensure it reflects the physical community it serves. In a digital community though, the membership is able to collectively set its own agenda. In other words, the Internet makes it possible to let the community decide for itself what is important. Anonymous’ message only became popular because some portion of the community agreed – it was bottom up instead of top down.
A final point is simply that physical communities aren’t naturally connected to many-to-many communication technologies. G Patton Hughes has shown that it is possible to successfully apply forums to physical communities, but I’m not convinced that the decentralized creation of ad hoc p-community forums provides an efficient and universally appropriate solution. Digital communities, on the other hand, are directly connected to communication tools; in fact they were probably built around them.
That wraps up my initial observations about this story as it relates to us, although there is a lot more that can be learned from it if you dedicate the time and snoop around. It shows that digital media can be used to facilitate identification of issues, effective provision of information about those issues, coordinated responses, and vital conversations. Hopefully it also resulted in some ideas about where to go from here if we want to use digital technology to empower physical communities.
View Comments (47)
Dan:
Okay, I totally get your point on violence. But there have been threats of violence that members of the group claim have been made by people not members of the group and there was a manfesto that was not exactly a paragon of nonviolence that members of the group say was not made by the group. One group member says one thing and another denys that anything like that was said or done. How do you know what is true and what isn't and how could you verify any of it? The whole concept of anonymous makes any criticism of anything totally pointless and useless because what could be done? It's a kind of digital nihilism or digital existentialism. Maybe you or I can sign a post and stand behind what we say. They can't for whatever reason. I wouldn't call it digital activism, I would call it digital pointlessism, like spam or spyware or junkmail. It comes from somewhere but what does it ultimately amount to. Nothing.
Great article Dan.
Hbone: It is very clear you are a scientologist, I am sure you received an email campaign from the co$ demanding you defend the cult - this is standard practice of the co$ and it highlights an interesting point.
Forceful use of digital (or any other) means to call to action does not succeed, because they are not fuelled by care, passion and conviction.
Anon works because it is a group of individuals who care about a cause, and it is fuelled by the passion for the cause. Trying to replicate the anonymous movement for any sort of marketing will as someone said above FAIL because it is simply doing so for the mighty $ - just how $cientology works, and the exact reason it is not working, it was invented for $, and it exists for $ only - Everything is modelled around maximum compliance for the greater financial gain of the cult.
Great article.
"Assuming it would be nice... well that's what these posts are about when you get to their core -- why was Anonymous successful at this type of thing while physical communities aren't?"
One main reason is that the Church of Scientology's abuses are so numerous and varied that their opposition cannot be pigeonholed into any one ideology. People who identify themselves as Christians, atheists, liberals, Republicans, Americans, Russians, nerds, hippies, and lawyers all have different bones to pick with Scientology, and so it's relatively easier to muster support against it than any one government institution.
The deadpan, authoritarian, hierarchical, litigious, and secretive nature of the Church of Scientology also seems to be the direct opposite of a collective whose culture is built on satirical humour, is anarchic, grassroots, and faceless, yet open-source. It all seems so fitting in a deterministic, evolutionary sense: Anonymous waged war on Scientology because it could; because after the Old Guard of critics and the ARS Central Committee, it knew that this was the next logical step.
And also, because in a physical community everyone has a name, a face, and is thus perceived very differently than the unknown source of a digital posting.
In real life, if your opinions are mocked or your suggestions are rejected, it's hard not to take it personally, and it's also natural to want to take credit for all your good ideas.
But when your words and criticisms of others' statements cannot be traced back to any one source (as on the *chans, IRC, wikis, or through anonymous YouTube videos), users form one mass consciousness (in this case, "Anonymous") that changes as messages are posted and people come and go, where political correctness is non-existent, and good ideas seem to spread like wildfire while poor ideas are countered with reason or simply ignored.
Other avenues, like SomethingAwful, Facebook, Enturbulation.org, and alt.religion.scientology (even with its lack of moderation) are more focused and less outright vulgar than 4chan's /b/, because everyone there has an identity and thus some sense of online accountability, but that also leads to greater infighting, reluctance of members to express unpopular opinions, and witch hunts for enemy infiltrators. This is why such a large, leaderless movement, against an evil that is not and doesn't affect the mainstream (as eight years of President Bush did the Ron Paul campaign) could not have arisen on a standard forum.
Couple points :
Scientology is a select target that has spent years harassing and angering Anonymous run communities. This corporation has long treated the Internet as its own little land of frivolous lawsuits and has had this coming for a long time. This corporation is now in full on damage control trying to play a victim to the anonymous masses of hate speech that hide on the Internet, when in all reality that has always been the corporation's stance toward the Internet and people on it all the way back to alt.religion.scientology BBS. They're just angry the real owners of the Internet have arrived and are harassing them back 10 fold on the streets where the general public can be informed and brought into the mix.
Second, you really can't understand the structure or raw cognitive dissonance of anonymous without participating in a few of the communities. The wikis, older huge forums, image forums, BTcommunities, IRC channels, etc all have a structure that guides elements of the whole. There are elements of anonymous that only Digg selected stories, fill the live journal community with news, flood wikipedia and wikinews with anonymous memes, flood faceboook and myspace with Anonymous propaganda, and intentionally buy low end advertising millions of times over to anonymous projects. The 'blogosphere' has very limited scope of what Anonymous is and does... only reporting on the older, well formed, communities that existed when blogging was a huge joke mocked by the original domain owners in the Web 1.0 world. Some would say it still is a huge joke manipulated by large communities to flood Google and larger channels, and to that end I agree.
Finally, Anonymous is not one group, or even a cohesive Internet community that agrees. Several elements are beyond livid the "Internet hate machine" has been hijacked and is being used for altruistic purposes. Several elements work against the Scientology efforts because they hate the thought of Anonymous turning into a personal army whenever Internet vigilantes are called upon. Most want to go back to the good old days when it was all in good fun to raid the social communities... but the trendy cool 'Anonymous' flags and propaganda can stay. That stuff rawks.
Anonymous is nothing more than a current incarnation of Internet culture, organized by the webmasters of old and to some extent new, and directed by grudges long held. Anonymous always acts in its own best interest, and that interest is by and large protecting Anonymous and the communities where Anonymous lurks. Scientology poked a hive of over 9000 bees 10 years ago when they attacked SomethingAwful. Since then as the Internet has spread everybody still remembers Scientology. Anonymous now controls an appropriate size and wealth of resources, and with these new found tools Scientology is getting what it deserves.
As will the next that break the rules of the Internet.
The people responding with anything more than 'Anonymous' in their names aren't anonymous, even if they choose to speak for Anonymous as if they are anonymous.
Figure that out.
Yes, what can we learn from this. Well lets see. There's religious bigotry. There's misinformation
& media manipulation. Qui bono? Qui might bono? The masks say it all. Where there isn't any responsibility, there isn't any credibility. Who better than an ANONYMOUS entity to make unsubstantiated claims & ridiculous parallels. & these are just the broader, public & systemic issues. On the personal level, when was the last instance you sought approval for your beliefs. Did you check the internet before your wedding? How about checking your social networks administers opinion about the leader of your church.
Or how about the person you haven't seen in your church for a while. Did you make a missing persons report & assume they have been "disappeared".
I can answer all these questions for you, NO because you didn't ask my permission. Had you, I would have laughed. Which is my response to masked, anonymous, whiners.
I don't want, seek or need your approval. This was assured more than 250 years ago.
We have many more important issues these "effective(ly) targeted communication tools" could be used for.
But no, we're wasting them on whether or not some religious bigots feel "validated" or "liked".
Hello there Dan, one thing you may not understand about us, is our drive.
We all crave one thing, the lulz. That which produces the highest amount of said lulz will be where our efforts go into. Any real anon will fight for the death for the lulz and the creation of more lulz.
We are a hive minded organization that can be described as chaotic neutral.
In lulz we trust.
Censorship on youtube is everyday occurance for a variety of topics not just this however Anon's home is under attack and shut down daily. Do not anger anon for we are many
Scientology has a big reputation for being bogus. Ever since the crazy celebrities dug their fingers into the religion, scientology has grown exponentially throughout the past couple of years. Now an unknown group of people named Anonymous has finally called out the religion. Not only did they degrade and insult all scientologists, they went to the Scientology website, http://www.xenu.net, and overloaded the site with information so that no other potential users could access the site. This brings up the point that people who are very knowledgeable with computers and the internet can use that skill or power to start “fights” or “wars”. Gangs have even held company websites for ransom via the internet. This should make us think more about the security of open system websites and how we can protect organizations free speech rights on the internet .
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