Anonymous is a global network of hacktivists, whose reach is wide and infamous.
If iPhones are the gateway to involving youth in modern protesting, parent companies are the roadblock – and Anonymous will not stand for roadblocks.
In the palm of their hand, young people everywhere hold a tool which has access to the internet, “the mode of carriage for all other media”, as Clay Shirky says in his 2009 TED presentation, ‘How cell phones, Twitter, Facebook can make history’.
As Mashable reports, groups are now developing apps to coordinate these movements more fluidly.
Mobile apps, however, are merely one mode of using the internet as a vehicle for activism; a global network of politically-geared internet hackers known as ‘Anonymous’, visible in the real world by their Guy Fawkes masks, and online by their many cyber attacks, which have so far targeted major organisations such as the Syrian Ministry of Defence, the CIA and even fought to stop the ritual killing of children in Gabon, organising both online and real-life protests and actions.
Due to the nature of the network, it is difficult and near impossible to ascribe a single motivation for Anonymous, however its extent shows the value and potential limitations of the internet for activists, as Rebecca MacKinnon, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation demonstrates in the following TEDTalk video.
A key benefit of web-based activism is, ‘At the most basic level… equality in status to corporations’, as is stated in How activist organizations are using the Internet to build relationships, published in the Public Relations Review in 2001; therefore if major corporations – the governors of the world wide web itself – are falling prey to the hands of political factions, the voices of the activists may be quashed – which is part of what the Anonymous movement is combating.
Nobody knows how far the Anonymous network stretches, nor the true force of its power. What the concept of this organisation demonstrates is that the internet has transformed political activism, and the mobile device has further enabled online protests to spill into the offline world.
P.s. Thankyou LeakSource for the image.
P.p.s. Thankyou TED for the video.
