Netcrowds

The very first time I met netcrowd phenomenon in action, was 1989. I was Secretary of Information and Internet Affairs of Student Union of University of Helsinki. Yes, there were quite a much net activism at those times, like GreenNet and PeaceNet.

One of the über student activist of Finland at those times, Raino Ollila (r.i.p.) came to me with very anxious mode with blank and fully printed papers.

- Kari, have you ever heard about Usenet? he urged.

- Yes, why?

- Fine. Now we need to send blank papers via every faxes we have on the office to these numbers. Here is also a list of phone numbers. Can we call to all of them at the same time?

- Not officially and not with my traits, but, well…

- Ok, let,s start with the faxes.

- Gzee, there will be fine phone bill to student union with these numbers, I sortly asked. – Are we going fax white papers to South Pole?

- Yes? I’m the Minister of International Affairs. Just go to faxes and start to send. Usenet will tell us what is happening. Go!

Later, when we found our way to proper Usenet group with our modest 1200 bps modem, the big picture start to brighten. Or at least to unfold. There was something really complicated happening in Tiananmen square. There were fifly official informer telephone lines waiting to possible students and others to inform about thestudent  participants of the situation on the Square.

But, someone innovative person has got the idea: what if people, mostly in student movement, collectively start to block these fifty phone numbers around the globe with calling, faxes and modems? Of course, there will be more phone lines etc. But, eventually, there might be a tipping point, when it is more complicated to set up new numbers and announce them than to block them. And the back channels to coordinate this action and spread the numbers realtime were Usenet and FidoNet.

That was the moment when I started to interest about the emerging netcrowd and internet as a platform of self-organizing masses.

In my dissertation I am examining and studying new forms of collective action and intelligence on the internet. Due to the new and emerging phenomenon, there is not an established single theory or term for describing it yet. I have coined it as netcrowd (verkkovoima in Finnish) . 

In this blog I introduce this netcrowd and some of its distinctive characteristics with some case descriptions  and essential sociological theories how they explain this new form of collective action. I also argument a sociological nature of netcrowd and point out some research lines of my dissertation. In my dissertation my aim is to create a theoretical model and rules of mechanisms how these netcrowds emerge, work and vanish after getting its project-like goals.

I have described the netcrowd as: ”a mass of occasional and ordinary people can organize themselves and act very quickly, efficiently, temporarily and globally for shared, concrete and collective goals on the internet without any formal coordination, common beliefs or other social ties or structures.”

This happened for example when Finnish citizens in Finland and Thailand solved the names of the victims of Tsunami (2004-2005), citizens of New Orleans started to track damages of Katrina hurricane and the locations of evacuated people (2005) across the country and internet users in Finland solved the identity of Finnish suicide bomber (2002). Netcrowd has often, but not necessarily, strict social goals, and in some cases it has tried to get an economical benefit to its participators. Some times, the netcrowd has temporarily replaced the officials, like ministries, specially in the cases after catastrophes.