It’s Your World, So Change It: Using the Power of the Internet to Create Social Change

C. A Short History of Online Activism Technologies

“New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.”—Marshall McLuhan

The story of online activism is as old as the story of human history. The technology we think of as “online” technology is, in reality, a mix of other media more traditional to the human experience—visual media, sound, and the written word, conveyed at an appropriate and convenient speed to its audience and co-creators.

This is the story of how those technologies gradually developed into the beautiful crescendo of instant communication, inexhaustible data, bright colors, and digitized sounds that we have available to us today—technologies ...