Our everyday world is being transformed into electronics; we read off of kindles instead of books, watch TV over the internet, become famous on youtube, and now you can even perform sit ins over the internet.
The Electronic Disturbance Theater established a website specifically meant for civil disobedience; http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
They set a day for their protest (as you can see on their site, the last being in 2008) and protesters download an "applet" which essentially continuously tries to load non-existent pages on someone's website.
"For example, participants were asked to input the names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal, forcing targeted servers to return an error message each time one of these "bad" URLs was requested. In a deft conceptual gesture, this process inscribed the "bad" URL in the server's error log as a way of symbolically returning the dead to those responsible for their murders. If enough people had run the applet simultaneously, they would have overloaded the server, so that when a regular visitor tried to access the site, pages would have loaded slowly or not at all." Mark Tribe Link
This makes the website almost impossible to load and navigate.
This introduces new possibilities for civil disobedience in cyberspace. I know I myself have signed a couple of petitions via internet. I have also learned in Political Science that social networks like "Twitter" have become the newest resource of organizing rebellions across the world.
Not only protests are changing but all different kinds of performances. I remember reading over other such performance art like The World in 24 Hours where artists from all over the world shared artwork via fax, telephone, and other forms of communication. Christiane Paul Reading Both of these examples show a new kind of "performance" by bringing people together, all in different places around the world, to "perform" a show together.
This is just another example how performance art is also changing with digital media. You don't have to demonstrate in the town square in front of people driving to work, but you can perform by sitting on your computer alone in your room "performing" to people traveling through cyberspace.
Very interesting post. The Zapatistas themselves were one of the first groups to use the internet to perform protests. It also begs the question of how effective these virtual protests are.
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