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

10. It’s Your World, So Change It

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”—Marshall McLuhan

I was in a friend’s passenger seat on the way home from the Mississippi State Capitol in early 2007, and we started talking about some e-petitions that people had filled out in lieu of calling local legislators. We were frustrated. My friend is young, but she’s an old-school community organizer; right now she’s organizing for the rights of low-income Miami residents, and at the time she was president of the Jackson chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). For my part, I was relatively new to activism but very much focused on getting stuff done, and I could see that most of what people did online that they referred to as activism ...