Networked advocacy or net-centric advocacy refers to a specific type of advocacy. While networked advocacy has existed for centuries, it has become significantly more efficacious in recent years due in large part to the widespread availability of the internet, mobile telephones, and related communications technologies that enable users to overcome the transaction costs of collective action.
The study of networked advocacy draws on interdisciplinary sources, including communication theory, political science, and sociology. Theories of networked advocacy have been heavily influenced by social movement literature, and refer to the preexisting networks used to create and support collective actions and advocacy as well as the networks that such actions and advocacy create.
History and scope of advocacy networks
Examples of formal transnational advocacy networks date back to 1823 with the formation of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions. Other examples include the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the anti-landmine movement. However, the number, size, and professionalism of networks, as well as the speed, density and complexity of international linkages between and within them, has grown dramatically since the 1960s. While advocacy networks as a whole have been able to grow in size in recent years, they nonetheless continue to vary in scale individually, with Keck and Sikkink noting that networks may operate transnationally, regionally, or domestically. One of the most important changes in recent decades has been in the ability of less formally organized or professionally run networks to grow and develop. Sometimes these networks eventually take on the characteristics of their more professionally managed counterparts and other times they remain strikingly informal.
Networked advocacy, by its nature, is more likely to be conducted (and to be identified) in a transnational context than a domestic one. But the mistake should not be made of considering only transnational networks of activists to be networked advocacy. A transnational character makes it easier to spot networked advocacy, but an international context is not a prerequisite. Two examples of advocacy networks from different ends of the American political spectrum serve as good illustrations of this point. Tea party activists and the protesters of Code Pink, though advocating for opposing political views, both have a horizontal, loosely connected network structure. Each group comprises smaller nodes dispersed throughout the country that are loosely connected with one another on a national level. These nodes can share lessons, techniques, and even resources, and they occasionally come together for larger conferences or actions. Both of these groups are also primarily focused on U.S. policy, defying the assertion that networked advocacy can only operate in a transnational context.
Elements of networked advocacy
Imagined communities
Benedict Anderson's 1983 book Imagined Communities defined nations as socially structured communities, and thus nationalism as something imagined by a group of people who perceive themselves as a part of that nation. By the time of Anderson's writing, social constructivism in the concept of nationality was hardly a new phenomenon. Walter Lippmann coined the phrase "pseudo-environment" in his 1922 book Public Opinion to refer to the ways people make sense of their worlds based on what they have individually experienced, what he called "the pictures in our heads". In popular culture, and much more cynically, Kurt Vonnegut had coined the term granfalloon to refer to a group which claims to have a common purpose but is actually meaningless. Vonnegut's main example is the group of people who claim to be Hoosiers and hence believe themselves intertwined by common identity despite having no other social or material connection. What set Anderson apart from these two other writers was his description of the connection between modes of communication and the formation of the modern nation state. According to Anderson, the rise of print-capitalism came with a standardization of language and writing in the vernacular. The standardization of writing allowed for a common discourse to emerge between people who were separated by long distances and experienced no direct personal interactions. This, in turn, enabled common identities to form and "imagined communities" to arise.