Social movement
Networks
As Reflected in Web Publications
Christopher Chase-Dunn and James
Love
Department of Sociology and Institute for Research on World-Systems
(IROWS)
University of
California-Riverside,
Draft v. 4-2-09 6133 words
Abstract: This paper
uses the Internet to study the sizes of and the contours of relationships among
contemporary social movements. Trends in movement size are estimated and we use
published web pages that contain mentions of pairs of social movements to
examine the network of movements. These results are compared with other studies
that use survey research to study movement networks. We use both counts of
published web pages produced by Google searches and trends in the volume of
searches produced by Google Trends.
To
be presented at the annual meeting of
the Pacific Sociological Association, This is IROWS Working Paper #49 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows49/irows49.htm
Thanks to Christine Petit
and Richard Niemeyer for their help on this research.
This paper examines the organizational space of
contemporary social movements by counting Web sites that mention pairs of
movements by name. In this study we seek
to understand the structure of connections among progressive social movements
and how those connections may be evolving over time. For this purpose we
analyze results obtained from using the Google search engine to count the number
of web sites containing certain phrases and pairs of phrases.[1]
We examine the contours of the social movement connections found on web pages,
and how these have changed over time.
The tricky problem is that our findings probably reflect other things as
well as changes in the structure of the network of popular movements in the
global public sphere. Undoubtedly our choice of the English language and the
vagaries of Internet search engines may also be consequential for our findings.
We shall try to sort out these different elements affecting the structure of
movement connections based on Web publications.
There is a large scholarly literature on networks, coalitions
and alliances among social movements (e.g. Carroll and Ratner 1996; Krinsky and
Reese 2006; Obach 2004; Reese, Petit, and Meyer 2008; Rose 2000; Van Dyke
2003). Our study is theoretically motivated by this literature as well as by
world-systems analyses of world revolutions (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein
1989; Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000) and Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of
ideological hegemony, counter-hegemonic movements and the formation of
historical blocks [see also Carroll and Ratner(1996) and Carroll (2006a,
2006b)].
The Internet is both a vast trove of information
and a global interaction network for producing new information about how people
think and their capabilities for transnational collective action. For those
social scientists who are interested in global phenomena this makes feasible
the extension of older research methods into new realms, and this extension is
fraught with issues that need to be resolved so that we can know how much to
trust the information generated by Internet research (e.g. see Bainbridge
2009). This paper will explore some of these issues.
We assume that the number of published sites on the Web
is to some extent a positive function of the number of people who support each
movement. This should be the case because popular support should provide more
resources and more activity, resulting in more publication. But there are
undoubtedly other factors besides popular support. Wealthy individuals or
political groups can pay for the production of Web publications. Official
government agencies and political campaigns can use the discourse of social
movements. Nevertheless we still think it is likely that the amount of
publication on the Web should be related to the size and strength of social
movements and we have used the Google search engine since 2004 to determine the
number of web pages on which certain phrases that indicate content relative to
each of seventeen social movements.
Social movement organizations may be integrated both
informally and formally. Informally,
they are connected by the voluntary choices of individual persons to be active
participants in multiple movements. Such
linkages enable learning and influence to pass among movement organizations,
even when there may be limited official interaction or leadership coordination. In the descriptive analyses below, we assess
the extent and pattern of informal linkage by ascertaining the links of
movements as indicated by Web publications.
At the formal level movement organizations may provide legitimacy and
support for one another, and they may collaborate in joint action. The extent of identification and formal
cooperation among movements both causes and reflects informal connections among
participants and the publication of web documents that combine movement
discourses.
The extent and pattern of linkages among the memberships
and among the organizational leaderships of social movement organizations are
highly consequential for the potential for collective action in local and
global political struggles. Some forms
of connection [e.g. “small world” networks, (Watts 2003)] allow the rapid spread
of information and influence; other forms of connection (e.g. division into
“factions” by region, culture, language or issue area) may inhibit
communication and make coordinated action more difficult. The ways in which
social movements are linked (or not linked) may facilitate or obstruct efforts
to organize cross-movement collective action. Network analyses can reveal
whether or not the structure of alliances contains separate subsets with only
weak ties, and the extent to which the network of movements is organized around
one or several central movement nodes that mediate ties among the other
movements.
Our Internet research on the structure of alliances among
social movements has been paralleled by a series of studies of transnational
social movements that have participated in the World Social Forum process
(Smith et al 2007; Chase-Dunn et al 2007). These studies obtained
survey responses from attendees at World Social Forum meetings in
The Relative
Sizes of Social Movements
Christine
Petit (2004) described her Google searchs performed on July 28, 2004 as
follows: “…I typed in the phrase ‘civil
rights movement’ and noted the number of websites containing that text.” The
parentheses return pages that have all the words together, whereas a search
without the parentheses would return all pages that contain the words even
though the are at separate places in the web document. She then did this for
each of the other sixteen movements listed in Table 1 below. And then she typed
in pairs of movements e.g. “civil rights movement” “anarchist movement”.
Table 1 shows the total number of hits for all the
movements and the percentages for each movement for 2004, 2006 and 2008. It
should be noted that the total number of hits increase from 2,055,310 in 2004
to 39,377,900 in July of 2006, and
then decreased to 12,556,340 in October of 2008. We suspect that the Google
search engine methodology became more selective between 2006 and 2008. It is
quite unlikely that the number of pages on the Internet decreased. But Table 1
shows that the relative percentages of many of the movements are quite stable
between 2006 and 2008, so we think it is likely that whatever difference in
search engine methodology that was implemented between 2006 and 2008 did not
much affect the relative distribution of movement presences on the Web, which
is the focus of our study.
|
Movement |
July 28, 2004 |
July 18, 2006 |
October 22, 2008 |
|
civil rights |
27.80% |
34.30% |
30.82% |
|
labor/labour |
19.50% |
15.80% |
14.38% |
|
peace/anti-war |
18.60% |
20.20% |
12.21% |
|
women's/feminist |
12.90% |
10.00% |
11.29% |
|
environmental |
7.10% |
7.20% |
7.10% |
|
socialist |
2.50% |
2.40% |
4.14% |
|
communist |
1.90% |
1.10% |
3.20% |
|
gay rights |
1.80% |
4.60% |
1.82% |
|
human rights |
1.80% |
0.90% |
7.67% |
|
anarchist |
1.20% |
1.00% |
1.36% |
|
anti-globalization |
1.50% |
0.70% |
0.83% |
|
national liberation/ sovereignty |
1.10% |
0.20% |
2.92% |
|
fair trade/trade justice |
0.70% |
0.40% |
0.46% |
|
global justice |
0.60% |
0.30% |
0.35% |
|
slow food |
0.50% |
0.50% |
1.11% |
|
indigenous |
0.40% |
0.30% |
0.33% |
|
anti-corporate |
0.10% |
0.00% |
0.02% |
|
Total % |
100% |
100% |
100% |
|
Total Number of Hits |
2,055,310 |
39,377,900 |
12,556,340 |
Table 1: Movement sizes as indicated by relative numbers of Web pages
These movement categories were originally designed
by Christine Petit for her 2004 study, and in order to be able to study changes
over time we have held to her original categories. Civil rights in the
The big five movements in Table 1 are civil rights,
labor, peace, feminism and environmentalism. Below these, the movements are
much smaller. In the Appendix we have a table that shows movement sizes based
on our studies of attendees at the World Social Forum in
We have already mentioned changes in the total number of
hits between 2004 and 2008 and the up-down trend of the civil rights movement.
Seven of the seventeen movements are quite stable over time in terms of
relative percentages: feminism, environmentalism, anarchism, fair trade, global
justice, and the indigenous movement. Peace and gay rights demonstrated an
up-and-down pattern across the three time points, as did civil rights. Labor
went down, as did anti-globalization, fair trade, global justice and
anti-corporate. Socialism and communism went up in the last period, as did
human rights and slow food.
Can we simply equate the relative sizes as an indicator
of movement strength, and can we interpret increases and decreases as changes
in the popularity and power of movements? It is well-known that Internet usage
and the publication of Web materials has been increasing geometrically since
the mid-1990s, and that both usage and publication have been diffusing across
the globe (Zook 2005). The growth and the trajectory of diffusion probably
affect the distribution of movement hits differently. Some movements were early
adopters and some have come later to Web publication. Thus trends should
reflect the diffusion process as well as changes in movement strength. Late
adopters should increase their percentages of Web publications over the time
period studied and early adopters should go down in terms of the relative
percentages of web pages.
But seven of the movements did not much change their
relative scores, and three others went up and then down. Labor,
anti-globalization, fair trade, global justice and anti-corporate went down.
Were these early adopters or did they actually decrease in movement strength
relative to other movements? Socialism, communism, human rights and slow food
went up in the last period. Were these late adopters or did they increase in
relative movement strength?
The geographical pattern of diffusion may also have
affected the Web activity of movements. As mentioned above, the civil rights
movement has been connected with the campaign for racial equality in the
Movement Topic
Size as Reflected By Web Search Activity
We have also used Google Trends, a tool for estimating
the number of searches performed by the Google Search Engine, and comparing
these over time to look for trends. We used this tool to examine the size
relationship among movement topics for the largest movements in our study
above. The number of searches is a different kind of indicator from the number
of web pages published. It shows how much interest the public has in topics and
how this has changed over time. Google Trends uses weekly data on searches
since January of 2004.
When we submit whole phrases such as “anarchist movement”
in Google Trends the program states
that: "Your terms - "anarchist movement" - do not have
enough search volume to show graphs." Only “civil rights movement” has
enough search volume to return a graph. This shows that searches for civil
rights movement varied over time and that the relative volume of searches
tended to decline over the period from 2004 to 2009 (See Figure 1).
Google Trends scaling
According to Google, data
are standardized based on the average search traffic of the term you
enter. Rather than producing raw search
results for the term, Google averages the weekly search counts during the
selected period and denotes this average as a 1. For example, if we searched “civil rights”
from 2004 to 2009 the graph would produce a baseline average for all searches
requested during the given period, represented as 1. However, if we observed that in early 2005,
the graph spiked to 3.5, this would inform us that searches during early 2005
were 3.5 times greater than the average searches attempted from 2004-2009. Google calls this relative scaling. When
multiple search targets are included in the same graph the user is allowed to
specify which of the items will be used to scale the rest of the items. We
chose to standardize the search counts on the “civil rights” movement topic. The
Google methodology does not make it clear how searches are compared across
different languages.
Figure 1: Relative volume of searches for "civil rights movement", 2004-2009[2]
For our study of the
relative size of movements we want to compare search volumes for the different
movements. We were not able to do this for the whole phrases containing the
word “movement,” but we were able to do it for main topics of the five largest
movements listed in Table 1 above based the sizes of published web material.
That is, we submitted the topics “civil rights,” “labor,” “peace,” “feminism,”
and “environmentalism” to Google Trends to examine how the search volumes for
these movement terms compare with one another. This worked in Google Trends and
produced the results shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Relative volume of searches for movement topics, 2004-2009
Figure 2 uses the civil
rights as unity (1) to scale the relative volumes of the five movement topics.
Civil rights is the blue line with diamonds and produces a trend similar to the
one shown in Figure 1 except that now we can see the relative sizes of the
search volumes for the other movement topics.
Whereas the study of numbers of web pages for social
movements discussed in Table 1 reveals that the civil rights movement is
considerably larger than the labor movement based on the number of web pages
published, when we examine the volume of searches we find that the topic of
“labor” is far larger than is the topic of “civil rights” based on comparing
the number of web searches by individuals using the Google search engine. So in
relative size terms numbers of web publications and the volume of searches are
somewhat different animals. The question for this paper is what do these
indicators have to do with the relatives sizes of social movements in terms of
numbers of adherents and other resources?
We surmise that the web page counts are better indicators of relative
movement size than are the search volumes. A large number of web searches that
contain a particular movement topic may only mean that something has happened
that has piqued the public’s interest in that topic. It is more akin to popularity than movement
size. Of course popularity can be a resource. But it may also be a liability.
It all depends on the meaning context. Searches for labor or civil rights may
be launched by both proponents and opponents of the the associated movements.
Nevertheless it is interesting to compare the
search volumes displayed in Figure 2. By far the highest are “labor,” which is
cyclical with annual high peaks in August or September, and annual low points
in December or January. The “peace” topic is similar in volume to labor, but
without the annual spiky peaks and low points. Civil rights is much lower in
volume, but is still higher than feminism, which is itself higher than
environmentalism. It is probably unfair
to use the topic of “environmentalism” to assess the amount of public interest
in environmental issues. When we
substitute “global warming” for “environmentalism” in Figure 3 we see that
global warming starts off at about the same level as civil rights, but then in
late 2006 it shows a large wave of search volume and stays fairly high until
2008. In 2009 the wave has fallen off somewhat, but it is still twice as high
as civil rights.
Figure 3: Movement topic search volumes with global warming, 2004-2009Figure 3: Movement topic search volumes with global warming, 2004-2009
We also use evidence from the Internet to study the interconnections among different social movements.
Network Structure of Social Movements in Internet Pages
We compare the overlapping of movements by counting web pages that mention the
names of movement pairs, e.g. environmental movement/labor movement at three
time points: 2004, 2006 and 2008. The counts of overlaps need to be
dichotomized for the purposes of network analysis using UCINet and we tried to
do this in a way that would make our results comparable with the study of
movement networks based on survey results. But the distributions of raw counts
were severely skewed (e.g. see Table 2 shows the raw counts for 2008), thus
raising the average of the counts far above the median of counts. To make the
distribution more normally distributed we performed a logarhythmic
transformation (log to the base ten) on the raw counts. We dichotomized the
logged overlap counts using the same cutting point used in the network analysis
reported above: ½ standard deviation above the mean to produce a network matrix
of zeros and ones. Table 3 shows the dichotomized scores for 2008.
|
Movement |
total |
civil |
labor |
anti-war |
women's |
enviro. |
socialist |
commun. |
gay |
human |
anti-glob |
anarchist |
national |
global |
slow food |
indigen. |
fair |
trade just. |
sovereign |
anti-corp |
|
civil rights |
4,190,000 |
|
111,000 |
37,100 |
53,500 |
37,200 |
8,200 |
5,790 |
21,900 |
13,300 |
2,820 |
1,930 |
1,290 |
1,940 |
474 |
686 |
279 |
76 |
719 |
133 |
|
labor |
1,150,000 |
111,000 |
|
13,400 |
18,800 |
20,700 |
89,300 |
38,800 |
2,620 |
7,120 |
3,170 |
6,270 |
2,470 |
1,890 |
184 |
800 |
576 |
63 |
214 |
211 |
|
anti-war |
655,000 |
37,100 |
13,400 |
|
6,590 |
7,100 |
8,610 |
3,850 |
3,690 |
2,690 |
4,340 |
2,260 |
1,680 |
3,580 |
98 |
349 |
408 |
63 |
222 |
157 |
|
women's |
787,000 |
53,500 |
18,800 |
6,590 |
|
11,400 |
4,240 |
4,840 |
5,980 |
13,800 |
1,250 |
1,030 |
777 |
685 |
145 |
559 |
150 |
22 |
123 |
53 |
|
environmental |
861,000 |
37,200 |
20,700 |
7,100 |
11,400 |
|
2,330 |
1,660 |
1,920 |
15,300 |
3,750 |
1,160 |
208 |
1,170 |
851 |
679 |
645 |
70 |
280 |
229 |
|
socialist |
533,000 |
8,200 |
89,300 |
8,610 |
4,240 |
2,330 |
|
12,500 |
2,040 |
1,140 |
2,240 |
5,990 |
1,620 |
530 |
2,530 |
324 |
30 |
991 |
856 |
46 |
|
communist |
408,000 |
5,790 |
38,800 |
3,850 |
4,840 |
1,660 |
12,500 |
|
433 |
527 |
861 |
2,410 |
6,230 |
315 |
86 |
233 |
15 |
7 |
83 |
27 |
|
gay rights |
228,000 |
21,900 |
2,620 |
3,690 |
5,980 |
1,920 |
2,040 |
433 |
|
3,260 |
272 |
149 |
30 |
67 |
22 |
19 |
18 |
5 |
50 |
7 |
|
human rights |
943,000 |
13,300 |
7,120 |
2,690 |
13,800 |
15,300 |
1,140 |
527 |
3,260 |
|
790 |
90 |
754 |
596 |
60 |
425 |
99 |
10 |
2,350 |
6 |
|
anti-globalization |
106,000 |
2,820 |
3,170 |
4,340 |
1,250 |
3,750 |
2,240 |
861 |
272 |
790 |
|
2,000 |
1,210 |
3,190 |
401 |
240 |
719 |
150 |
140 |
627 |
|
anarchist |
167,000 |
1,930 |
6,270 |
2,260 |
1,030 |
1,160 |
5,990 |
2,410 |
149 |
90 |
2,000 |
|
525 |
471 |
8 |
73 |
17 |
7 |
88 |
28 |
|
national liberation |
314,000 |
1,290 |
2,470 |
1,680 |
777 |
208 |
1,620 |
6,230 |
30 |
754 |
1,210 |
525 |
|
95 |
6 |
111 |
9 |
5 |
68 |
6 |
|
global justice |
45,400 |
1,940 |
1,890 |
3,580 |
685 |
1,170 |
530 |
315 |
67 |
596 |
3,190 |
471 |
95 |
|
28 |
168 |
288 |
85 |
71 |
96 |
|
slow food |
138,000 |
474 |
184 |
98 |
145 |
851 |
2,530 |
86 |
22 |
60 |
401 |
8 |
6 |
28 |
|
7 |
212 |
13 |
124 |
5 |
|
indigenous |
42,100 |
686 |
800 |
349 |
559 |
679 |
324 |
233 |
19 |
425 |
240 |
73 |
111 |
168 |
7 |
|
34 |
7 |
108 |
5 |
|
fair trade |
44,000 |
279 |
576 |
408 |
150 |
645 |
30 |
15 |
18 |
99 |
719 |
17 |
9 |
288 |
212 |
34 |
|
814 |
8 |
20 |
|
trade justice |
15,100 |
76 |
63 |
63 |
22 |
70 |
991 |
7 |
5 |
10 |
150 |
7 |
5 |
85 |
13 |
7 |
814 |
|
2 |
6 |
|
sovereignty |
52,100 |
719 |
214 |
222 |
123 |
280 |
856 |
83 |
50 |
2,350 |
140 |
88 |
68 |
71 |
124 |
108 |
8 |
2 |
|
1 |
|
anti-corporate |
5,570 |
133 |
211 |
157 |
53 |
229 |
46 |
27 |
7 |
6 |
627 |
28 |
6 |
96 |
5 |
5 |
20 |
6 |
1 |
|
Table 2: Raw number of paired hits for social movements in 2008
|
movement |
civil |
labor |
anti-war |
women's |
enviro. |
socialist |
commun. |
gay |
human |
anti-glob |
anarchist |
national |
global |
slow food |
indigen. |
fair |
trade just. |
sovereign |
anti-corp |
|
civil rights |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
labor |
1 |
|
0 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
anti-war |
1 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
women's |
1 |
1 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
environmental |
1 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
socialist |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
communist |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
gay rights |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
human rights |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
anti-globalization |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
anarchist |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
national liberation |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
global justice |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
slow food |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
indigenous |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
fair trade |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
trade justice |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
0 |
|
sovereignty |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
0 |
|
anti-corporate |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
Table 3: Paired hits dichotomized at 1 standard deviation above the mean in 2008
The QAP routine in UCINet was
used to calculate the Pearson’s r correlation coefficients for the logged
network matrices scores in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
2004-2006 .91
2004-2008 .91
2006-2008 .88
Table 4: QAP Pearson's r correlations for logged pair scoresLogged Pearson’s r correlation coefficients
The three matrices of log scores are highly correlated with one another, indicating a rather high level of stability of the network of social movements.
2004 2006 2008
1
civil rights movement
.367 .336 .363
2 labor
movement/labour .367 .408 .393
3 peace/anti-war
movement .367 .479 .366
4 women's
movement/feminist .324 .297 .291
5
environmental movement
.274 .274 .308
6
socialist
movement .299 .310 .363
7
communist
movement .236 .206 .291
8
gay rights
movement .171 .146 .310
9 human
rights movement .199 .146 .155
10
anti-globalization movement .270 .224
.166
11
anarchist
movement .278 .224 .053
12 national
liberation movement .173 .116 .000
13
global justice movement .143
.178 .000
14
slow food
movement .028 .000 .022
15
anti-corporate movement .024
.000 .096
16
indigenous movement .000
.000 .000
17 fair trade/trade justice
movement .000 .000 .000
18
sovereignty
movement .000 .043 .155
Table 5: Multiplicative coreness scores from binary movement matrices, 2004, 2006 and 2008
Table 5 shows the coreness scores calculated from the dichotomized movement matrices for 20-04, 2006 and 2008. Coreness reflects the density of connections of each node. This table shows that most of the movements do not change their centrality or lack of it much over the four year time period. The gay rights movement gets more central between 2006 and 2008 and the anti-globalization movements declines since 2004. The anarchist movement become less central after 2006 as do the global justice and national liberation movements. The sovereignty movement gets more central.
Figure 5 below depicts the network structure of movement links based on the Internet page counts for 2004. None of the movements were completely disconnected from the matrix by the dichotomization of the logged overlap scores. But the slow food movement has only one tie to the network through the anti-globalization movement. The civil rights movement is both the largest in terms of individual counts of web pages and in terms of overlaps with other movements as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 4: Movement network structure in 2004 based on web hit pairs
Figure 4 includes both the civil rights movement and the human rights movement. It is often assumed that the human rights and civil rights movements are basically the same thing, but there are important differences between the two based on our web page study. The civil rights movement is far larger in terms of total web page publications than is the human rights movement. And with regard to position in the network of social movements, the civil rights movement is much more central. In retrospect it was probably a mistake to not to include civil rights in our list of studied movements at the World Social Forum. There we found that human rights/anti-racism was one of the largest movements and was the most central in the network of movements. We do not know how our study of movements using survey results at the WSF meetings might have been different if we had included civil rights.
Figure 5: Movement network structure in 2006 based on Internet page pair mentions
The 2006 web page network results included a huge jump in the total of web pages with movement name pairs, which raised the mean number of overlaps. Despite that we logged the counts, the cutting point at ½ a standard deviation above the mean left five movements disconnected from the main network of movements: slow food, indigenous, fair trade/trade justice, and anti-corporate. The gay rights movement is less well-connected than it was in 2004.
Figure 6: Movement network structure in 2008 based on Internet page pair mentions
By 2008 the slow food movement has become reconnected to the main network and the gay rights movement has again become as strongly connected with other movements as it was in 2004.
Conclusions
As
with our other studies of movement network structures based on survey research
responses, the networks show a rather consistent pattern of both movement size
distributions and the network of connections among movements. In all cases we have a single multicentric
web in which a few more centrally located movements connect most of the rest to
one another. This is a robust network structure that is unlikely to experience
major splits despite that often large contradictions among the goals pursued by
the individual movements. The web network results confirm our findings based on
individual commitments to movements in that there are at least some links among
most of the movements. This structure bodes well for the emergence of a new
global left that may be able to effectively contend in world politics.
Appendix: Comparing Web and Survey Results
Christine
Petit (2004) conducted a Google search engine project to study networks among
social movements as represented by texts available on the World Wide Web in
2004 and in 2006 she replicated her study in order to make it possible to
ascertain change over time and so that we can compare the results with our
survey evidence from the Porto Alegre World Social Forum of 2005.
|
|
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
|
|
July 04 Web hits |
% of total July04 |
%movement selections at WSF05 |
July06 web hits |
% of total July06 |
% 04-06 change in hits |
|
anarchist movement |
25,100 |
1.7% |
1.50% |
395,000 |
1.5% |
0% |
|
anti-corporate movement |
1,780 |
.1% |
3% |
15,100 |
.05% |
-.05% |
|
anti-globalization movement |
30,300 |
2% |
5% |
291,000 |
1% |
-1% |
|
global justice movement |
11,500 |
.8% |
6% |
112,000 |
.4% |
-.4% |
|
human rights movement |
36,500 |
2.5% |
12% |
362,000 |
1.4% |
-1.1% |
|
communist movement |
40,000 |
2.7% |
2% |
425,000 |
1.6% |
-1.1% |
|
environmental movement |
146,000 |
10% |
11% |
2,820,000 |
11% |
1% |
|
fair trade/trade justice movement |
14,830 |
1% |
5% |
159,200 |
.6% |
-.4% |
|
gay rights movement |
37,100 |
2.5% |
3% |
1,830,000 |
7% |
4.5% |
|
indigenous movement |
8,090 |
.5% |
4% |
120,000 |
.5% |
0% |
|
labor movement/labour |
400,000 |
27% |
6% |
6,220,000 |
24% |
-3% |
|
national liberation/sovereignty movement |
21,610 |
1.5% |
3% |
87,600 |
.3% |
-1.2% |
|
peace/anti-war movement |
382,000 |
26% |
9% |
7,950,000 |
31% |
5% |
|
slow food movement |
10,500 |
.7% |
3% |
199,000 |
.8% |
.1% |
|
socialist movement |
52,000 |
3.5% |
7% |
952,000 |
4% |
.5% |
|
women's movement/feminist |
266,000 |
18% |
5% |
3,940,000 |
15% |
-3% |
|
total |
1,483,310 |
|
|
25,877,900 |
|
|
Table 6: Internet hits in 2004 and 2006 compared with movement sizes obtained from survey questionnaires at the World Social Forum in 2005
For Table 6 we combined the fair trade movement and trade
justice movement web hits to make the Petit study comparable with the WSF
survey, and did the same with national liberation movement and the sovereignty
movement.
The comparison between web hits and movement choices at the WSF (Columns B,C
and E) show that the relative sizes are rather similar for ten of the sixteen
movements that are compared. This establishes a baseline of comparability
between these two very different sources of information about movement
linkages.
Six of the movements display what appear to be significant differences between
web texts and numbers of activists at the World Social Forum. Human rights,
global justice, indigenous and fair trade are better represented at the WSF
than on the web. Labor, peace and feminism are significantly less
represented at the WSF than on the web.
Looking at the change scores for the web hits in Column F, we see that the
biggest increases are in gay rights (4.5%) and the peace movement (5%). The women’s movement and the labor
movement have gone down by 3%, but the rest of the movements have stayed about
the same in percentage terms while the total numbers of hits increased
dramatically between 2004 and 2006. The general stability of the relative sizes
despite the rapid growth over the two year period and fairly good match with
the WSF survey data increases our confidence that we are measuring something
significant about the discursive space of transnational movements with the Internet
results.
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