Crowd Work and Networked Publics as Civic Activism

Digital network affordances are said to have changed the modalities of civic activism and advocacy, allowing personalized and intermittent participation, and making organizational boundaries more permeable. At the same time, commercial applications of crowdsourcing and ‘harvesting’ online publics’ communications abound. How can we understand the marriage of these two trends, when activist and advocacy groups rely on crowd work to pursue their goals? This study proposes a conceptual framework to understand the participation of ‘crowds’ in civic activism. It argues that activism is fundamentally about the collective production of the goods information, credibility, and attention – information about issues of public concern, credibility as a source of such information, and attention towards this information. Partaking in the production of these goods as part of an online crowd or a networked public thus constitutes an instance of participation in activism. This framework is conceptually specified at the individual-, the group-, and the ecological (country) level of activism with the help of a case study of the issue industry of citizen election monitoring. The study empirically explores the framework through the websites, Twitter profiles and Facebook pages of a small sample of 90 crowd-enabled citizen election monitoring initiatives in 50 countries. It is suggested that metrics based on user behavior can be utilized to gauge crowd participation in activism at the group and ecological level in future research.