A Bounded Future: The Fate of Horizonalism in an Online Social Movement
André Spicer and Zhongyuan Zhang, University of Warwick
Social movement organizations associated with the ‘alter-globalization’ movement have high hopes. They seek to change specific aspect of the organized social world such as media and communications, environmental practices or security dynamics. But what sets them apart from typical ‘social movements’ is that they also try to directly enact new ways of organizing. Part of their central innovation is the creation of novel modes of organizing. In particular, many of these new wave social movements have sought to create ‘horizontal’ organizations which emphasise participation, activism and open access. Indeed many of the iconic organizations associated with the movement seek to define themselves as doing away with the ‘boundaries’ which have plagued so many other social movements. They also try to avoid any fixed differentiation between who or what is inside and the outside of the social movement. In this paper we want to investigate the fate of boundaries in these apparently ‘boundaryless’ organizations. In particular we want to ask (a) whether it is possible to have a boundaryless social movement, (b) how boundaries do arise in these social movements how, and (c) what tensions there might be between the public declarations of boundarylessness and boundaries which might be established within a social movement
To examine these tensions we look at the changes in the articulation of boundaries in an online based alternative media movement which we call alt.media (a pseudonym). We focus on this movement because it is relatively young social movement, it is committed to a broad ideology of boundarylessness, and it uses electronic technologies and a networked based organizational form which seem to be conducive to boundarylessness. We tracing through the seven year history of the organization using frame analysis. We focus on their main collective email list which is one of the main organizing tools used by alt.media. In particular we have asked what (if any) boundaries frames were used, how they were used, and when.
We find that in its earliest days, alt.media mobilised a boundary frame of ‘boundarylessness’. This frame seemed to chime with the broader ideology of ‘horizonalism’ which was shared among many of the media activists involved. It also had the strategic advantage of making the group appear to be more accessible to a range of potential participants. After the initial founding, there continued to be a strong commitment to the frame of boundarylessness. However, a more device frame began to appear. This was a boundary frame that divided parties into those who were ‘active’ and those who were not. This was particularly evident in episodic discussions about ‘lurkers’. Over time this act/non-active boundary frame became deeply entrenched. The result was that border between active and non-active became increasingly strictly policed. This meant that it became increasingly difficult for people to move across this border. On the one hand, some new joiners found themselves daunted by the rigid barriers (e.g. initiation rituals, trust tests, and the familiarity with the tacit norms and history of the organization that is naturally unshared by new joiners) that they have to overcome before being recognized as qualified activist comrades. On the other hand, core membership became increasingly resistant to any cross-overs, increasingly stable in terms of membership and wary of any outsiders who were deemed to be non-active.
There might be a number of reasons why boundary frames became increasingly strong within this apparently boundaryless movement. The first reason was that the pattern of framing developed at its founding became increasingly routinsed in the interaction of members. The result was that the accepted language and patterns of framing became dominated by the frame of active / non-active. We identify that underlies this process of frame-routinisation is the built-in tension between an ideal, somewhat ‘unworldly’ frame and the ‘worldly’ reality of alt.media as it struggles to cope with its routine operations. This tension leads to our second reason: as alt.media developed as an organization, the active / non-active frame became increasingly built into the organizational form. In particular the fluid, informal, network based forms of organizing seemed to favour those ‘insiders’ who has been deemed active. The final reason why the boundaries strengthened in alt.media was field level dynamics. As the broader field of ‘anti-globalization politics’ became increasingly mature, social movement organizations within it became increasingly entrenched in their own position. The upshot was that a field which was previously dominated by a ‘logic of equivalence’ (where movements would seek to develop bridging frames), was suddenly dominated by a ‘logic difference’ (where social movements would seek to develop boundary frames which draw a strict separation between the inside and the outside of the social movement).