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The Whole Online World is Watching: Profiling Social Networking Sites and Activists in China, Latin America and the United States

Using a cross-cultural framework, this study relies on survey data to examine how activists in China, Latin America, and the United States use social networking sites for their mobilizing efforts. Activists in China assigned greater importance to social media to promote debate. Those in Latin America expressed more apprehensions about the ease of using social networking sites. Respondents from the United States had greater confidence in their own ability to solve community problems. New technological advances have created rapid changes in global communication systems, altering how people send and receive information. The transformation, however, has not only affected how people communicate but who has access to communication tools and, in turn, who can reach a broader public sphere of debate and discussion. For those working along the margins of government and corporate spaces, communication tools such as the Internet and social networking sites (SNS) are among a new set of devices that might be used to do activist work. In fact, Kahn and Kellner (2004) argued that the Internet offers alternative forces and progressive groups a chance to reconfigure the political sphere, and Aouragh (2008) posited that the Internet strengthens social and political agency. Likewise, authors such as Ayers (1999), Diani (2000), and Marmura (2008) have addressed the instrumental and symbolic contributions of digital tools to social movements and activists groups.