Internet activism has been criticized on grounds that it gives disproportionate access to affluent activists, because poor people, minorities and elderly citizens either lack access or are inexperienced in the new technologies. Another concern, expressed by author and law professor Cass Sunstein, is that online political discussions lead to "cyberbalkanization" - discussions that lead to fragmentation and polarization rather than consensus, because the same medium that lets people access a large number of news sources also lets them pinpoint the ones they agree with and ignore the rest....
"The experience of the echo chamber is easier to create with a computer than with many of the forms of political interaction that preceded it," Sunstein told the *New York Times*. "The discussion will be about strategy, or horse race issues or how bad the other candidates are, and it will seem like debate. It's not like this should be censored, but it can increase acrimony, increase extremism and make mutual understanding more difficult." Other critics of Internet activism have suggested that it can be counterproductive because it "makes people feel like they've done something when they haven't," in the words of Allen "Gunner" Gunn<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Allen_Gunn&action=edit&redlink=1>of The Ruckus Society, a training group for activists based in Oakland, California. "That's the low-hanging fruit and doesn't really mean they've embraced the issue ... and politicians understand that." "The Internet connects an ideologically broad anti-war constituency, from the leftists of ANSWER <http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ANSWER>to the pressed-for-time 'soccer moms' who might prefer MoveOn <http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=MoveOn>, and conservative activists as well," observes Scott Duke Harris. According to University of California professor Barbara Epstein, however, the Internet "allows people who agree with each other to talk to each other and gives them the impression of being part of a much larger network than is necessarily the case." ... She warns that the impersonal nature of communication by computer may actually undermine important human contact that always has been crucial to social movements. [5]<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5093013.htm>However, some Internet sites, such as Meetup.com <http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Meetup>, have been used by activists for the very purpose of overcoming the social isolation that has become common in modern, TV-fed society. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Internet_activism -- Dr.Maya S. Guest Faculty School of Social Sciences Mahatma Gandhi University Kottaym, Kerala www.cogito-maya.blogspot.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send an email to greenyo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to greenyouth+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB.
