The overall questions that should frame your investigations include:
- Are e-forms of collective action/representation of interests any different
to traditional forms? If so, how and why?
- Do e-forms simply work in parallel, replicating traditional forms or do
they add something qualitatively new?
- To what extent does the electronic medium allow people to express and act
on their collective interests in a way that they would not be able to under
traditional means?
- What are the criteria for effective collective action and how effective
in your view are the e-forms you have studied?
When looking at websites and presenting your group’s ‘findings’, you may want
to consider the following:
- Some contextualisation of the case is necessary although this should not
form the primary part of your input: summarise the issue/event/campaign, who
is involved, what is involved etc.
- What elements of collective representation and action are demonstrated in
any one site? Think about the issues discussed in session 2, namely:
- Impression Management
- Democracy
- Voicing
- Information dissemination
- Information sharing
- Communication
- Archiving
- Relational density
- What is the nature of the profile of the representation of collective interests
as presented publicly on the web site?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the electronic representation of,
and campaigning for the collective interests you are looking at?
- Is the site and associated links user friendly? How easy is it to move between
screens? Do you need special facilities/software/hardware?
- How easy is it to interact with the site: get access to chat rooms, enter
the debate etc? Is the site inclusive or exclusive: who is able to contribute?
- Can you get access to any of the chat rooms, electronic forums to see the
kind of debates going on, is it only a select group or is there varied involvement
etc?
- Is it possible to see the number of hits/visits the site has gained: how
wide is the profile?
- Who authors the site: who controls the public profile of the interest group?
Is there a dominant voice? How democratic is the representation?
- Where else does the site link to? What is the relational density? Can you
map the links as demonstrated in session 1?
- What is the international profile of the representation?
- Investigate organisations/groups/other media, where you might expect there
to be some coverage of the collective action/representation of the interest
group. This may be other websites where you might imagine there would be links,
or perhaps you might look at newspaper archives to see the coverage by non-electronic
means.
- Compare the sites associated with the action you are looking at with other
examples (websites, literature). What could be improved?
Exercise
Look at these sites and evaluate/assess the use of ICTs for collective representation
on the basis of the above criteria .
www.warwick.ac.uk
www.reclaimthestreets.net
www.tuc.org.uk
www.tgwu.org.uk
www.gpmu.org.uk
www.oocities.org/transport_and_society
Now think of some other sites which you know or use and repeat the exercise.