CRITICAL MASS How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly By JENNIFER 8. LEE

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/weekinreview/23JLEE.html

WASHINGTON - Before the global protests against war in Iraq last weekend,
organizers were already making conference calls and passing out fliers for
their next set of demonstrations, including one scheduled for next
Saturday, outside the White House.

But then, the worldwide protests drew millions of people onto the streets,
from San Francisco to London, and the Bush administration hit some
diplomatic roadblocks. Sensing delay in White House momentum, the
organizers themselves paused and decided to make a strategic move, delaying
the demonstrations from March 1 until March 15. They spread the news the
old-fashioned way, through alternative radio stations and word of mouth,
and the instantaneous way, through Web sites and e-mail messages.

Organizing a protest is fundamentally about logistics: where do people
meet, how do they get on a bus, who will order portable toilets. Obviously,
the Internet, like fax machines and copiers, has made the tasks easier.
Before last weekend's protests, for example, people registered online for
buses to New York. And a mass e-mail notice was sent out to New York
protesters, informing them about public bathrooms in Midtown Manhattan and
giving them a number to call in case of arrest.

But the Internet has become more than a mere organizing tool; it has
changed protests in a more fundamental way, by allowing mobilization to
emerge from free-wheeling amorphous groups, rather than top-down
hierarchical ones.

In the 60's, the anti-Vietnam War movement grew gradually. "It took four
and a half years to multiply the size of the Vietnam protests twentyfold,"
said Todd Gitlin, a sociology professor at Columbia University and longtime
liberal activist.

The first nationwide antiwar march in 1965 attracted about 25,000 people.
By 1969, the protests had grown to half a million. But increasing the
numbers required weeks and months of planning, using snail mail, phone
calls and fliers.

"This time the same thing has happened in six months," Mr. Gitlin said.
Even though momentum behind the demonstrations didn't grow until a month
ago, after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United
Nations, more than 800,000 people turned out in 150 rallies in the United
States last weekend, from 100 in Davenport, Iowa, to an estimated 350,000
in New York City. In Europe, more than 1.5 million protested.

The protests had no single identified leader and no central headquarters.
Social theorists have a name for these types of decentralized networks:
heterarchies. In contrast to hierarchies, with top-down structures,
heterarchies are made up of previously isolated groups that can connect to
one another and coordinate.

Because no central decision-making authority exists, protests can be
localized and can appeal to new groups and individuals who don't live in
areas where social protest information would typically reach. For example,
Mothers Acting Up was started two years ago by four women around a kitchen
table in Boulder, Colo., a liberal college town. But with their Internet
site, www.mothersactingup.org, they have been able to reach 600 like-minded
members across the country, many of whom participated in marches last week.

Technology also spreads word of rallies to countries where free expression
is limited. In Singapore, where the government does not allow
demonstrations at the American Embassy, cellphone text messages went out,
exhorting recipients to gather at the embassy anyway. The text messages,
which work like mass e-mail messaging to mobile devices, attracted at least
a half-dozen placard-carrying demonstrators at the gates at the appointed
time. The police rounded them up for questioning.

"Whenever a new communications technology lowers the threshold for groups
to act collectively, new kinds of institutions emerge," said Howard
Rheingold, the author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," which
documents self-organizing and leaderless movements. "We are seeing the
combination of network communications and social networks."

His book tells the story of how cellphone text messaging helped bring down
Joseph Estrada, the Philippine president who was ousted after protests in
2001 over corruption. Text messaging advertised instant rallies, encouraged
people to protest by wearing black and provided updates on the impeachment
trial. (In the same way, cellphone messaging is potentially alarming for
the Chinese government. Officials do not have centralized control over the
network and therefore cannot censor it, the way they do the Internet.)

E-mail lists have allowed individuals to create groups that defy geography
and time. Thousands of people have joined hundreds of antiwar lists, and
diverse streams of messages fly back and forth quickly, vastly different
from the information flow in hierarchies. Since the beginning of the year,
300 messages have been posted on a popular antiwar list in Sydney,
Australia, that has almost 900 members. The notes range from solicitations
for donations to United Nations updates to appeals for local volunteers.

This is mass mobilization, but also nimble mobilization. Protesting a war
that hasn't begun requires a constant eye on the calendar of government
action. And the movement's flexibility maximizes its impact, organizers
say. A protest date can easily be moved, timed to affect the latest
diplomatic maneuver.

"We are trying to stay a step ahead of the administration by our planning,"
said Damu Smith, chairman of Black Voices for Peace, one of hundreds of
groups involved in last week's demonstrations. And staying ahead of the
game "is absolutely strategically central in our ability to be effective in
what we are doing."

Military theorists are fond of saying that future warfare will revolve
around social and communication networks. Antiwar groups have found that
this is true for their work as well.


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html