Communication Strategies by Chilean teenagers for social change
12:54, 9 April 2009
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Using online technologies for advocacy isn't just the domain of young people in the USA... and it's hardly a new practice: this Brief Review of the Early History of Nonprofits and the Internet (before 1996) talks about nonprofits using the Internet for advocacy work, and I wrote about using handheld computer technologies in advocacy, as well as in community service, back in 2002, with examples of a few years before. In short, using online tech for advocacy is an established practice. What's much harder to find than examples of online advocacy are studies that analyze a specific group or action and tease out the human resources and practices needed for such an effort to be successful.Here is such a study, and it would be great if there were more:
A student movement in Chile protesting the effects of an education law used a variety of online means to get their message out. According to a study by Ana Rayén Condeza Dall’Orso for the Université de Montréal and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, "[t]hey distributed their speeches and actions ...through communication across a whole range of channels – evidence of their communication strategies and discourses can be found on Web pages, national and international online traditional media Web records (radio, television, and newspapers), Web logs (blogs), Fotologs, Wikipedia [an open and free internet encyclopaedia of user-generated information], emails, chats, You Tube and mobile phones." They also scheduled press conferences just prior to prime-time television shows and transmitted resolutions directly to the entire country, formerly a practice considered a privileged use limited to Chile's president. As students took over and occupied schools, they carried out coordination through mobile phones and email and posted pictures in the media and on the internet to show the public the activities inside the lyceums. International media interviewed them; they appeared on programmes speaking with government authorities; they received coverage on international non-governmental organisation (NGO) web sites; and their advocacy caused the United Nations (UN) to contact the Chilean government on behalf of children's rights. They used Wikipedia to become, as stated here, narrators of their own history.
The author concludes that the Penguin Revolution shows: 1) that adolescents sharing social concerns are able to organise self-directed movements for participating in social change processes; 2) how they use media communication for movement purposes; and 3) what might be the social relevance and the possibilities of non-traditional social actors’ access to media, new media, and mobile technologies.
Read the full document here.
