Mobile Communication and Social Movements

“Swarming” Tactics and Mobile Phones

The first widely publicized incident of mobile phones being used in social movements was in 1999 when anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrators found innovative use of their Nextel walkie talkies during the so-called “Battle of Seattle.” Because of newly available connectivity, activist groups could coordinate collective action and carry out systematic tactics of “swarming” (i.e., the congregation of a large number of protestors to block parts of the ministerial meeting physically), and then rapid dispersion before the arrival of extra police. By this time, the demonstrators would be congregating at another location, following the military strategy of dynamic, nonlinear warfare.

This was not an entirely new mode of protest, but mobile media allowed activists to carry out their “swarming” campaigns much faster and more simply, and at a larger scale. The effect of such “flash mobilization” was so impressive that Howard Rheingold argued it was a harbinger for “smart mobs,” where total strangers could form instant solidarity to struggle for a collective goal.

Adding mobility and perpetual contact to the phone leads to a quantum leap for the old device to serve as the basis for new modes of sociopolitical mobilization, for the emergence of what Manuel Castells views as “instant communities of practice” that turn a proposal for action into a communication generating multiple responses supporting the action.

This is at the core of the concept “mobile civil society,” which was proposed by Castells and others who argue that mobile phone usage in social movements can lead to a new form of civil society. It enables independent communication from individual to individual and group to group; it is collectively intensive but with strongly personal dimensions. This bypasses mainstream media and enables an alternative public space.

The “Battle of Seattle” remains a prototype for demonstrators to protest the injustice of economic globalization at WTO and G8 meetings, from Montréal in 2000 to Geneva in 2001, from Cancún in 2003 to Hong Kong in 2005. Whereas mobile devices now are routine in activism, the shock effect has seemingly declined because the security forces have kept pace. At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, for example, police were reported to have infiltrated text-message networks of anti-Bush protesters. Meanwhile, the number of participating activist groups and individuals increased to the point that more “central management” was required through such organizational platforms as TxtMob and Rockus. This altered the decentralized and spontaneous person-to-person pattern and was also more prone to be blacked out by the phone company, either intentionally or unintentionally.

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