myBLOC.net: Virtual Networks for Real Activism

Next week, from June 22 to June 24, the Allied Media Conference will take place in Detroit, MI. This year this annual gathering of alternative media-makers will focus on the “participatory media that empowers the producer and receiver” so as to create new networks and build social movements. As Sabrina Ford explained in The Nation last month, this conference partakes in a wider trend in which activists build virtual mobilization networks not just through email but through interactive websites in the logic of the Web 2.0.

Following the example of MySpace.com, a group of young activists got together to create myBLOC.net, a collaborative website where progressive youth organizations can operate web pages and share information. The initiative was initially funded by the Surdna Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and CTFC, and supported by the Movement Strategy Center and Future 5000, two broker organizations that support American grassroots youth activism. One of the first large-scale events benefiting from this initiative, in addition to the Allied Media Conference next week, is the first-ever US Social Forum to be held in Atlanta, GA, from June 27 to July 1.

Although the actual effect of this trend on American activism can only be assessed in the long run, such collaborative virtual networks have the merit of increasing the leverage of resource-deprived organizations and fostering transversal relations between socio-political actors. The challenge will be to avoid reproducing on the web the inequality between organizations that exists in the real world.