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Carrotmob: Digital activisim – the capitalist way16. March 2011 – 10:06 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH) |
We have seen countless examples of digital campaigns interlocking with offline activities aimed at protesting against something or the other. And even though I agree that protest campaigns can be very important we have seen far less examples of digital activism for a particular thing. I would like talk about one initiative that makes use of the net and our role as consumers to facilitate actual positive change in the offline world.
The Carrotmob initiative was started in San Francisco in 2008 and wants to make use of strategic consumption to change businesses behaviour. The video below shows how this approach works:
How Organized Consumer Purchasing Can Change Business from carrotmob on Vimeo.
The key aspect is that all participants, consumers and businesses, can achieve their goals without damaging the other. The buycott (as opposed to boycott), as it is sometimes called, does make use of core market principles and therefore is a “capitalist friendly” way of activism.
Even though the actual actions or buycotts are very local the initiative has spread to many countries all over the world. The internet is used both to communicate on the worldwide scale and to organise the local events. The organisers make use of their own websites and platforms like Facebook or Twitter to, in the end, organize offline activities.
Form this point of view the net is just a tool which helps to globalize and organize a creative form of activism. But I would argue that this kind of coordinated action and the quick spread to this many countries would not have been possible without the use of the net a tool for communication.
Thanks to Thore for introducing me to the idea.
guides and useful out of the box solutions and their collections for the new generations of activists – who are focusing on mostly the less developed part of the world. 
