Does Boycotting Online Work?
We are going to be doing a larger piece on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) later, with the help of our Fif-TECH-Teen correspondent Sean, but as a preview we are going to look into the effectiveness of the online boycott.
One of the well-honed tools of any activist is the boycott. It is how one can vote in numbers by not voting…in numbers. One would suspect that on the Internet, a platform predicated on populist ideals (whether it knows it or not), group activism like the boycott would be especially easy to organize. One would be correct in this assumption, to a degree.
Organizing the masses online is the easy part; action is often more difficult. And even when action is taken, boycotts in particular function differently than their offline counterparts. The problem involves visibility and perceived visibility. Since it is so easy to engage like-minded people and then tally up the number of those people engaged, there is a false narrative of success with ease when it comes to online activism. The lurking variable: who is paying attention? The answer: far too often it is the pastor preaching to the choir.
Anybody who has ever seen a “One Million Strong Against The New Facebook Redesign X” group can tell you that assembling an opinionated group is easy. They can also tell you how easy they are to ignore, despite the numbers. What is lost in translation is that a one thousand person petition holds far less weight than one thousand people occupying a space. Sure, that has always been the knock on petitions, online and offline, but this logic also applies for the online boycott. When one thousand people leave your website, the only person who notices is the intern who monitors the analytics. There is no visible trail of dissent. All the sound and the fury of the boycotting group amounts to nothing outside of their own echo chamber.
Here is the challenge of activism online. Just like neurologists have shown that one gets almost all the pleasure of a completed task by just imagining its completion, one gets almost all the pleasure of making a statement by hearing from others that a statement is being made. There is a list, with one thousand people on it. They all say this is great. It feels good. Well, who else hears about it? These are not one thousand bodies, just names and analytics scores.
A few weeks ago, a list of companies supporting SOPA was passed around the Internet and a lot of noise was made about boycotting everybody on the list, from Disney to Nike. The list was so large (over 400 companies) that a blanket boycott was clearly impossible. So, Internet activists chose to focus. They picked one name off the list to go after first, the one with the clearest online ties — GoDaddy. Now here was a boycott that would make some noise! The action item was simple; move your URL to a different domain host. That is all they sell, that was all that had to be done. So, a day of domain switching was set up and people started moving out. GoDaddy publicly reversed course on their SOPA support. Job well done! Right?
Perhaps. This is the first high profile example of an online boycott working (to whatever extent it worked) but the circumstances could not have been more advantageous to success. Internet goods, an Internet audience, only people on the Internet care and this was an Internet problem. In this case, it was as if our hypothetical one thousand bodies were there in the flesh. Here’s where it gets tricky. There are still ~400 companies in support of SOPA and at the end of the day, the impact on GoDaddy’s bottom line was minimal. Sure they took a PR hit, but they’ve already survived PR nightmares, including warming over their CEO’s pension for very big game hunting. And the number of domains changed were a drop in their financial barrel.
Ironically, GoDaddy is an Internet company whose goal seems to be currying favor with a less Internet-savvy crowd. Their target demographic (at least as far as one can interpret their commercials) is the, for lack of a better term so borrowing one I’m sure has been used in a GoDaddy board room, “Nascar crowd.” It is feasible that loosing a percentage of the crowd that cares about SOPA fits the GoDaddy business model. Despite their change in stance, it’s hard to imagine this boycott having legs beyond this debate, in which the odds are still set against the anti-SOPA contingent.
So, even when online boycotting works, it seems to not work as well as needed. And it’s hard to argue that this is just because of some specifics of GoDaddy, because the success is also due to some specifics of GoDaddy. In the next few months, as the debate of SOPA rages on, we will get to see other examples of online activism and perhaps that will make more clear its merits, but for now the success or failure of the boycott seems to be as vague as what comprises a virtual boycott. Where do names become bodies become analytics become dollars become change? I guess we will have to wait and see…
– JO
