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| By lowering the costs of communication, the web promises
to enable distributed collectives to act around shared issues.
However, many collective action efforts never succeed:
while the web's affordances make it easy to gather, these
same decentralizing characteristics impede any focus
towards action. In this paper, we study challenges to
collective action efforts through the lens of online labor by
engaging with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Through
a year of ethnographic fieldwork, we sought to understand
online workers' unique barriers to collective action. We
then created Dynamo, a platform to support the Mechanical
Turk community in forming publics around issues and then
mobilizing. We found that collective action publics tread a
precariously narrow path between the twin perils of stalling
and friction, balancing with each step between losing
momentum and flaring into acrimony. However, specially
structured labor to maintain efforts' forward motion can
help such publics take action. |
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| · SLIDES |