Tagged: Activism RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 10:23 pm on October 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Activism, , , ,   

    Academic Research on the Pink Chaddi Campaign 

    Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

    Sapna Dudeja from Jamia Milia Islamia is doing research on the Pink Chaddi Campaign and I’ll be grateful if you could take out five minutes and fill out this questionnaire.

    Here’s Sapna’s note on her research –

    My research project is titled "Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space: Through the Prism of The Pink Chaddi Campaign". It is a Habib Kidwai Fellowship project, financed by James Beveridge Media Resource Centre, AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia.

    There will 4 different chapters in my final report. First one would be an introduction to the campaign. Second will include the data that I have collected by interviewing various people who were involved in the campaign. Third chapter will trace the connection between feminist debates in India and the pink chaddi campaign. Fourth will conclude the report with appropriate remarks/findings etc.

    So the interview that I had with you and the data that I am able to collect through the survey that I have designed will all go into the second chapter of my report. Since the MCRC people are really keen to add new, authentic data to their archives, this chapter is the most important of all.

    I have earlier written about the Pink Chaddi Campaign and what marketers can learn from the campaign.

     

    • Sr. Helen 2:28 am on October 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      this is very good article it is very useful for me.
      thank you.
      i am librarian of pushpanjali college of education Vasai. learning about blogs

    • Anuprita Sardesai 2:30 am on October 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      This report will be useful for media students.

      Anuprita Sardesai
      Librarian
      SIES College of Commerce & EConomics

    • r4 revolution ds 2:32 am on November 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Thanx for the valuable information. but I still did not get it why they named the campaign…. keep posting. Will be visiting back soon.

    • jobs 11:16 am on November 9, 2009 Permalink | Reply

  • Gaurav Mishra 5:48 pm on August 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Activism, Armchair Activism, , , Nano-Activism,   

    CNN-IBN Story on Facebook Activism 

    I was quoted some time back in a CNN-IBN story on Facebook activism.

    I have earlier written about the perils of Facebook activism, including the tendency towards armchair- or nano-activism and the the threat of getting hacked.

    Here is the video of the CNN-IBN story –

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 5:16 pm on August 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Activism, , , Conquest, Entrepreneirship, , , , ,   

    What Can Entrepreneurs Learn From Activists? 

    Earlier today, I gave a talk on entrepreneurship at Conquest 2009 at BITS Pilani.

    The title of the talk was “What Can Entrepreneurs Learn From Activists?” and here are three lessons I focused on –

    1. How to engage people who aren’t going to spend much, or anything at all, at little or no cost?
    2. How to build a vibrant community around a social object that is bigger than the brand, campaign or organization?
    3. How to tap into the partner and volunteer ecosystem beyond the organization?

    I also talked about what ails tech entrepreneurship in India and highlighted some open opportunities in the Indian internet space.

    Here is the slide deck from the talk –

    Other speakers at the event included Ajit Ranade, Chief Economist, Aditya Birla Group; Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm; Raj Gollamudi, Co-founder, Blue Stream Ventures; Prajakt Raut, Founder, Orange Cross; Naren Dubey, Chief Operating Officer, Scan Café; Shashikant Khandelwal, Founding Member, TheFind Inc; Rahul Chandra, Co-founder, Helion Venture Partners; Mukul Singhal, Associate, Canaan Ventures; and Gayatri Rath, Vice President, Corporate Communications GE.

     

    • Vaibhav Gadodia 11:38 am on August 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Slide 11 is strikingly similar to a startup that me and some colleagues started almost 2 years ago… it had all this and more, and it was on an SMS platform.

      It excites me to see such a description :D

  • Gaurav Mishra 3:02 am on June 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Activism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,   

    Associated Press Story on Iran’s Twitter Revolution 

    I was interviewed recently by Associated Press on a story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ –

    Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-09 Yahoo Fellow at Georgetown University, said he hasn’t seen any evidence in past events such as the Moldova elections that Twitter was the dominant way people are organizing.

    “It’s sometimes difficult to differentiate the hype from the media,” he said. “Just because people are tweeting about something doesn’t mean that there’s actually coordination involved.”

    The story was also reproduced in The Guardian, The Independent, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, CBS News, Forbes, Huffington Post and Boston Globe.

    I have previously written about why the term Twitter Revolution is already a cliche, after Moldova and Iran.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 2:55 am on June 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Activism, , , , , , , ,   

    BusinessWeek Story on Iran’s Twitter Revolution 

    I was interviewed today for a really well-researched story in BusinessWeek on why it’s misleading to call the post-election protests in Iran a Twitter Revolution.

    “I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

    Mishra, who has organized social media activism campaigns for elections in India, says the main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media. Indeed, one of Twitter’s primary contributions in the Iranian elections has been to raise awareness of the issue among tech-savvy users outside the country.

    “Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools,” Mishra says. “So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

    I have previously written about why the term Twitter Revolution is already a cliche, after Moldova and Iran.

    Here is the full text of the story –

    Iran’s Twitter Revolution? Maybe Not Yet

    Some Iranian election protesters used Twitter to get people on the streets, but most of the organizing happened the old-fashioned way

    By Joel Schectman

    Media across the globe have been focusing on a “Twitter Revolution” in Iran as hundreds of thousands of street protestors purportedly mobilized their demonstrations using the microblogging service. So great has the notion of Twitter’s role in the Iranian protests become that the U.S. State Dept. reportedly asked the company to defer some maintenance. Twitter says it rescheduled maintenance work from June 15 to later the next day, or about 1:30 a.m. in Iran. “It made sense for Twitter…to keep services active during this highly visible global event,” the San Francisco company said on its blog.

    However, Iran experts and social networking activists say that while Iranian election protesters have certainly used social media tools, no particular technology has been instrumental to organizers’ ability to get people on the street. Indeed, most of the organizing has occurred through far more mundane means: SMS text messages and word of mouth. Sysomos, a Toronto-based Web analytics company that researches social media, says there are only about 8,600 Twitter users whose profiles indicate they are from Iran.

    “I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

    And with the government blocking the Twitter site, that small group becomes even smaller. Tech-savvy netizens can use proxy addresses such as Tor or Proxy.org to bypass the government block of certain IP addresses. But for many users, circumnavigating the government’s blockage is too big a hurdle, and organizing in more conventional ways, such as over the phone or by knocking on doors, can be both quicker and easier. Moreover, Twitter does not support the Farsi language, which limits its utility, particularly in more rural areas of the country.

    Raising Awareness Elsewhere

    Mishra, who has organized social media activism campaigns for elections in India, says the main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media. Indeed, one of Twitter’s primary contributions in the Iranian elections has been to raise awareness of the issue among tech-savvy users outside the country.

    “Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools,” Mishra says. “So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

    Another reason for the hype surrounding Twitter’s role in these protests is the lack of good access for reporters in Iran and the difficulty of covering the story of the protested elections. Iran’s religious leadership declared incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner on June 12 with 63% of the vote a mere two hours after polls had closed. The opposition, which had largely supported Mir Hussein Mousavi, took to the streets of Tehran to protest; bloody crackdowns by police and militia followed. At least six people have died and many more have been injured, according to reports.

    For now, these tools represent the best chance the demonstrations have of getting continued coverage. “Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The reason social media is so interesting [for the press] is that the international media doesn’t have its members on the ground.”

    Twitter in Moldova?

    Zuckerman analyzed protests in Moldova this past April, which were also labeled a “Twitter Revolution,” and found the vast majority of tweets, or Twitter postings, during the protests were coming from outside the country, either Moldovan expats or just people sympathetic to the movement.

    “Of the 700 people who were twittering on the Moldovan protests, less than 200 were in Moldova at the time,” Zuckerman said. “Social media are helpful in exposing what’s happening to the outside world, but it’s a mistake to think that these protests [in Iran] are because of social media. It’s more conventional things like word-of-mouth and phone calls that really bring massive numbers of people into the streets.”

    A study by Mike Edwards, a social network researcher at Parsons The New School for Design, examined 79,000 tweets related to the Iran protests, and found that one-third are repostings of other tweets. The general ratio of reposts to posts is 1-to-20, and even in other fast-breaking global news events, when reposting might be more common, such as the swine flu outbreak, Edwards says he has seen the number go only as high as 1 in 5. This could indicate the amount of information deployed by protestors in Iran is small compared to the amount recirculated by outsiders, although Edwards cautions there are other possible explanations.

    “There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening,” Edwards says. “The hubs are generally not people on the ground, and many are not in the country.”
    Exaggerating the News?

    One analyst cautioned that while Twitter or Facebook may keep the outside world’s attention trained on Iranian protests, there was also a danger such tools could exaggerate the movement’s momentum. “You can get the notion that Ahmadinejad is very unpopular and that Mousavi has this groundswell of support, but we don’t have data that shows that,” says Reva Bhalla, director of analysis for Austin (Tex.)-based Stratfor, a strategic intelligence and forecasting company. “Ahmadinejad has real support, but his supporters don’t have smartphones. There is a real risk of amplifying [one side].” Ahmadinejad is thought to have a greater base of support in rural areas, while Mousavi is popular with urbanites.

    Still, regardless of how much a mover social media may be in the protests, Iran watchers agree that the tools do represent a step forward. “Governments like Iran, Syria, and Egypt are really struggling with how to continue limiting information,” Bhalla said. “No matter how hard these governments try to block communication, now there is always going to be a hole. This really is a case study in how technology can affect closed societies.”

    Mousavi introduced the use of social-networking tools to his campaign last month, Iran experts say, because he didn’t have the access to state-run television and newspapers Ahmadinejad enjoys. “They needed an alternative means to campaign and get their message across,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. But Parsi, like others, acknowledges that Facebook and Twitter were important mainly for letting people outside the country follow events, and text messages and phone calls were the primary mover of people in Iran’s protests. “The people I know mainly tell me they hear about these protests from friends or by SMS,” Parsi says.

    __

    Schectman is a reporter for BusinessWeek in New York

    This quote was also reproduced in Information Week and Christian Science Monitor.

     

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  • Gaurav Mishra 10:47 am on June 17, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , Activism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,   

    Updated: The Irony of Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ 

    Iran Green Revolution

    I had earlier written about the use of social technologies in the 2009 Iran presidential election campaign.

    Now, Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s supporters are disputing the overwhelming victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the elections (Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices).

    Various observers have called the protests ‘Facebook/ Twitter protests’, claiming that social media tools have been critical in organizing these protests (Clay Shirky on TED Blog, Lev Glossman in Time, Mark Ambinder at The Atlantic). The #IranElection Twitter feed has indeed been hyperactive all week (Ben Parr in Mashable).

    Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Delicious have also been used to organize DDOS attacks against government and pro-Ahmedinejad websites, including Ahmadinejad.ir (Noah Shachtman at Wired). It seems that some US bloggers are also promoting these DDOS attacks (Nancy Scola at TechPresident) and a DC based political firm is actually participating in them, in a misguided (and illegal) attempt at digital activism (Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy).

    Some Ahmadinejad supporters are also using blogs and Twitter to explain why they believe he legitimately won (Hamid Tehrani in Global Voices).

    In an attempt to quell the protests, the Iran government has blocked several social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, apart from several international news websites (Richard Sambrook at BBC, Associated Press).

    On the other side, the US State Department has reportedly “asked Twitter to refrain from going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time” (Elise Labott at CNN, Nancy Scola at TechPresident).

    Twitter is being used in many ways in post-election Iran: for organizing protests, for sharing first hand reports from the ground, for focusing international attention on the protests and for changing the news agenda for international news organizations.

    When the dust settles down on the Iran election crisis, we will see that Twitter was more useful as a media tool and not as an organizing tool. We will see that Twitter didn’t really change much in Iran in terms of organizing the protests, but it did play an important role in engaging the international community in the protests and focusing media attention on the protests (see Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy, Daniel Terdiman at CNet and Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW on #CNNFail).

    In fact, there are less than 10,000 Twitter users in Iran (Sysomos via BusinessWeek) and less than 100 of them seem to be active. Given these small numbers, it’s quite amazing that their tweets have generated such a multiplier effect via retweets etc. (The number of Twitter users in Iran might be artificially high as of today because of a misguided campaign that asked people to change their Twitter location to Tehran to make it difficult for the Iran government to target dissidents.)

    However, the on-ground organizing in Iran is probably happening via mobile phones and offline networks, the same networks that were previously used to mobilize Mousavi’s supporters to go out and vote for him.

    Calling the Iran protests a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche, after Moldova.

    Mary Joyce at DigiActive.org uses my 4Cs social media framework to evaluate the campaign and says: “this campaign has achieved Content Creation and Collaboration on Collective Action, but will it be able to create a Community which will sustain long term action once the Iranian election is gone from the headlines?”

    Evgeny Morozov shares my skepticism about “the claims that Twitter has been instrumental in organizing the protests” and thinks that it mostly played a role “in publicizing the violence or the already planned protests and rallies.”

    Nancy Scola at TechPresident agrees that, “as we saw in Moldova, the idea of a “Twitter Revolution” isn’t always borne out by the facts, at least to the extent that the uprising would have not taken place without the tool.”

    Brand Stone and Noam Cohen at NYT agree with me that “labeling such seemingly spontaneous anti-government demonstrations a “Twitter Revolution” has already become something of a cliché.

    Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is annoyed at the media hype for Twitter “because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.”

    Ethan Zuckerman is amazed at “the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions.”

    Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic reminds the intelligence community that most reports on Twitter are noise, not signal intelligence.

    Tom Watson at TechPresident reminds us that there are limits to what technology can do, “especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers’ guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall.”

    Update: June 23, 2009

    Social media analytics company Sysomos has done some great analysis on Twitter users in Iran. According to Sysomos, the number of Twitter users in Iran increased from 8654 in mid-May to 19235 in Mid June, after #iranelection. Between June 11 and June 19, the nature of tweets from these users changed. On June 11, Iran Twitter users were writing about “mousavi”, “freedom” and “vote”. On June 19, they were writing about “mousavi”, “tehran” and “protest”. Also, the percentage of #iranelection tweets coming out of Iran changed from 51.3% on June 11 to 23.8% on June 19, as a result of the international interest in the post-election protests.

     

    • Gunjan Rawal 1:41 pm on June 17, 2009 Permalink

      Nice post. Apart from content and collaboration, what in your mind are the social and demographic factors that contribute to this viral effect? Have you seen other examples of communities moving to collective intelligence? would something like change.gov be an example?

    • Regolo 2:08 pm on June 17, 2009 Permalink

      I perfectly agree, but it’s important to underline how the global community is engaging this situation as world-wide help and support movement, the possibilities of a real world cooperation throught the web is today really concrete!

    • Kevin Donovan 10:47 pm on June 17, 2009 Permalink

      We need another one of your new rules: “every political uprising will make use of online tools, especially those with lower barriers to entry” just like you pointed out that “every notable event will first be reported via SMS (likely Twitter)”

  • Gaurav Mishra 9:36 am on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Activism, Authenticity, , , , , Chinese Blogosphere, Daily News and Analysis, , , , , , ,   

    My Interview With Indian Daily DNA on Blogging as a Change Agent 

    Quick Summary: I was quoted yesterday in Indian newspaper DNA in a story on whether blogging in India is mature enough to act as a change agent.

    - X – X – X -

    I was quoted copiously in Indian daily DNA in a story on whether blogging in India is mature enough to act as a change agent.

    A good approach to answer this question is to compare social media usage in India with social media usage in China –

    Social media usage in Metro India and Metro China is driven by very different consumer behavior. In Metro China, Creators, Critics and Joiners all play an important role, whereas in India, Joiners are the predominant drivers of social media usage.

    Social media usage in India and China also have significant differences in terms of the topics that drive conversation. Richard Edelman has written an interesting introduction to the Chinese blogosphere –

    Social media in China has two constant themes: the rich/poor divide and nationalism… The best Chinese bloggers are… incredibly impressive, committed to change, convinced that they were part of a new China where individual expression and frank speaking will win.

    This type of strong activism isn’t really visible at least in the more popular Indian blogs.

    In the interview, I also talked about how brands can use social media to build authentic relationships with customers and citizens and how individuals can use social media to build solid reputations as experts in a topic.

    Here’s the complete text of the story –

    Blogging Pains in Mumbai
    Surekha S
    Tuesday, June 17, 2008 20:34 IST

    In the US elections, blogs are seen as an effective medium to sway voters’ minds. But in Mumbai, the impact of desi blogs to bring about social change is minimal, say bloggers

    In a bid for the presidential seat, US senator, Barack Obama relies on a team of bloggers whose sole job is to quell any negative publicity during the course of the campaign. And the fact, that Internet-savvy Obama is successfully harnessing the power of the web is a point worth noting.

    Which makes one wonder whether the blogging medium in Mumbai, and the India, has that kind of power. Can it be used as effectively here for political campaigns, for promoting companies, products or to bring about a social change?

    “The Batti Band campaign, which saw the participation of a large number of Mumbaikars, was promoted primarily through blogs,” says Gaurav Mishra, who has been blogging for the last three years. However, he says, that while activism through blogs is very strong in China, it has still to pick up in India.

    As the head of sales and marketing for a national automobile company, Gaurav writes about how marketing is changing, how people are tired of being bombarded by commercial messages, and how marketing needs to adopt a more humane approach. “Though blogging as a trend is picking up, the blogging community is still very small. It is not big enough to bring about a change in the election results, but it surely can mobilise 3,000 to 5,000 people”, he says.

    With the increasing popularity of social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook, the next trend is blogging to bring about change. And this trend is seen not only among youngsters, but also among companies and marketing agencies, that have recognised the potential of a blog to reach out to a new generation of users.

    But we still have a long way to go. Ramya, a suburban resident who has been blogging for the last four years, says, “In India, Internet usage is low, and blogging is still a new concept. It surely will be ineffective in political campaigns as among the voters, only a small section have access to the web.”

    The bottom line is simple: Blogging as medium of change and a tool to spread awareness is picking up, but the impact is marginal. “Most people do not understand the scope of the medium. Also, there is the question of reliability and responsibility. There are many random blogs, and most of them deal with personal issues,” says Ramya.

    Nineteen-year-old Yashashri got hooked to blogging around two years ago thanks to her brother who was an avid blogger. “You can write about your experiences, you can use it to spread messages and most importantly, it helps connect with like-minded people across the globe,” she says. “It can also act as a platform to talk about socially relevant issues and get the participation and perspective of people miles away.”

    Most people in Mumbai blog at a personal level, and see it as a means to connect with other people. Nikita Banerjee, a journalist with the magazine Animation Reporter, sees blogging as a great medium to meet new people and make new friends. “Blogs are also a good place to showcase your work.”

    Even our celebrities have got into the act. “Though blogging is becoming increasingly popular, it still seems far fetched to think of a day when every second person will have a blog. In India we still do not feel the desperate need to be heard,” says Mishra.

    And more importantly, will the blogs have traction among surfers? “We need more blog readers, but more than that we need knowledgeable people to write. Authenticity is driven by the person writing the blog. It is not about how well you write, but how much you know about what you write,” says Mishra.

    And while it might take us a few more years to get there, we seem to be on the right track.

     

    • ashish 10:06 am on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I’d rather ask – how many serious bloggers do we have in India?
      I see more aggregators than bloggers!

    • vivek khandelwal 4:50 pm on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Hmmm so we do have scope of a .com that can take this initiative of creating Intelluctual Maturity …on Expressing opinions..
      Thts a +1 for me ..
      Nways good to see the media catching up bloggers..And one day they Wud feel j.
      AMEN.

    • vivek khandelwal 4:59 pm on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      hey ..this seems to be interesting ..perhaps one day the media wud feel j..Btw nybody willing to Create Awareness has loads and loads of scope..

    • Gaurav Mishra 9:18 am on June 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      @Ashish: Yes, that’s a good question too, although if you look at the data , we aren’t Collectors either, we are Joiners.

      @Vivek: Mainstream media has been interested in bloggers for a while now. I get pinged for stories at least once a month. :-)

    • Reveda 3:24 am on November 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Well I think that there are lot of change agents in India in the space you talked about. People in India are beginning to express themselves in a big way. I am just a 21 day old kid and I have a blog- a blog that captures my original thoughts from my perspective. My dad is writing this for me and I am sure this blog will have a profound effect on my developmnt as a kid.

      Please give me your honest feedback and if possible follow me at

      http://reveda.blogspot.com/

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