Database Website// Web Culture// WebDesign

Internet Activism Archive is a website containing a small amount of events related to Internet Activism. The website was created as an archive of different kinds of Internet Activism events.

Internet activism (also known as web activism, online activism, digital campaigning, digital activism, online organizing, electronic advocacy, cyberactivism, e-campaigning, and e-activism) is the use of electronic communication technologies such as social media, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster and more effective communication by citizen movements, the delivery of particular information to large and specific audiences as well as coordination. Internet technologies are used for cause-related fundraising, community building, lobbying, and organizing.

A digital activism campaign is "an organized public effort, making collective claims on a target authority, in which civic initiators or supporters use digital media." Research has started to address specifically how activist/advocacy groups in the U.S. and Canada are using social media to achieve digital activism objectives.You can check out the archive HERE!

The first few sketches were rather rough. I wanted to make sure that it would be easy to see where the particular internet activism protests originated from, where the hackers were from or where they were organising themselves. However, one of the issues I ran into quite quickly was that the whole purpose of Internet Activism isn't that it's limited to one specific place, or one specific country. Internet Activism in general is spread out all over the world and thus the design needed to be changed.

With the new sketches I made sure that all information would be visible at all times. I decided to split Internet Activism in general up into three separate categories. Action/ Reaction, Awareness/ Advocacy and Organisation/ Mobilisation. I decided to use those three categories in my design as well, creating this Triptych design. Each article that I've collected has been placed in one of these categories. This way of organisation also creates a very easy way to check which type of activism were used during every single case of Internet Activism.

The timeline you see below took quite a lot of figuring out to get the design right. I wanted to fit all of the cases of Internet Activism I'd found into the same timeline and get the start dates and end dates correct. This turned out to be quite a hassle because in a lot of cases it's very uncertain when it started and when and if it even ended. I had to fill in some gaps and this timeline was the result.