Organizing Technologies: Genre Forms of Online Civic Association in Eastern Europe

Abstract

How do civic associations in Eastern Europe organize themselves online? Based on data collected on 1,585 East European civil society Web sites, the authors identify five emergent genres of organizing technologies: newsletters, interactive platforms, multilingual solicitations, directories, and brochures. These clusters do not correspond to stages of development. Moreover, newer Web sitesare morelikely to be typical of their genre,suggesting that forms are becoming more distinctive. In contrast to the utopian image of a de-territorialized, participatory global civil society, the authors’ examination of the structure of hyperlinks finds that transnational types of Web sites are not inclined to be participatory. Whereas other paradigms focus on inequality of users’ online access, the authors probe inequality in the accessibility of Web sites to potential users through search engine technology and show how this varies across different types of civil society Web sites.

Keywords

technology Internet civil society Eastern Europe participation Web site analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Agresti, Alan . 2002.Categorical data analysis. New York: John Wiley.

Barabási , Albert-László , Réka Albert , and Hawoong Jeong . 2000. Scale-free characteristics of random networks: The topology of the World Wide Web. Physica A 281: 69-77.

Barley, Stephen . 1986. Technologyas an occasionfor structuring: Evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly 31: 78-108.

Boczkowski, Pablo J. 2004.Digitizing the news: Innovation in online newspapers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Callon, Michel . 1991. Techno-economic networks and irreversibility, In A Sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology, and domination, ed. J. Law , 132-161. London: Routledge.

DiMaggio, Paul , Eszter Hargittai , W. Russell Neumann , and John. P. Robinson . 2001. Social implications of the Internet. Annual Review of Sociology 27: 307-336.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1993.The printing revolution in early modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Fischer, Claude S. 1992.America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hand, Martin , and Barry Sandywell . 2002. E-topia as cosmopolis and citadel: On the democratizing and dedemocratizing logics of the Internet, or, Toward a critique of the new technological fetishism. Theory, Culture, and Society 19 (1-2): 197-225.

10.

Hindman, Matthew , Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis , and Judy A. Johnson . 2003. Googlearchy: How a few heavilylinked sites dominate politics on the Web. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago.

11.

Hutchins, Edwin . 1995.Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

12.

Kuti, Eva . 2001.A nonprofit szektor fõbb statisztikai jellemzõi. Budapest, Hungary: Központi Statisztikai Hivatal.

13.

Latour, Bruno . 1991. Technology is society made durable. In A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination, ed. J. Law , 103-131. London: Routledge.

14.

Latour, Bruno . 1999. On recalling ANT. In Actor network theory and after, ed. John Law and John Hassard . Oxford, UK: Blackwell, the Sociological Review.

15.

Orlikowski, Wanda J. 2000. Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science 11 (4): 404-428.

16.

Robinson, John P. , Paul DiMaggio , and Eszter Hargittai . 2003. New social survey perspectives on the digital divide. IT&Society 1 (5): 1-22.

17.

Ward, Joe H., Jr. 1963. Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. Journal of the American Statistical Association 58: 236-244.

18.

Yates, JoAnne . 1989.Control through communication: The rise of the system of American management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.