Practicum 4 - Kyle Woolwich

So, just as a recap, I'm going to go over what I've discussed in the first half of my project. I observed both revolutionaries in Egypt and activists protesting the collective bargaining bill at the capitol in Madison, and observed both similarities and differences between the two groups. Overall, the users of both groups tended to be young (undergraduate and graduate students for the Madison online activists, and young professionals in Egypt). Additionally, they both used the internet primarily as a forum for organizing real life protests. However, both of these events have died down and so it has been much harder to find new groups and/or users to observe. So, I've moved on to a different group of student activists around campus who are protesting a voter ID bill in the Wisconsin state Senate and Assembly (I'll cover this more in a later post), and I've also observed opposition activists in Libya.

Here are some of the activists I've been following, who seem to be some of the more popular online users:

http://twitter.com/#!/ShababLibya
http://www.facebook.com/LibyanYouthMovement
http://twitter.com/#!/LibyanStateTV - a parody account
http://twitter.com/#!/ChangeInLibya
http://twitter.com/#!/EnoughGaddafi

Interestingly, all of these accounts seem to have a pretty good relationship with each other, and tend to interact on a semi-regular basis. Similarly to the activists in Egypt, these activists appear to be mostly youth who are using . Additionally, it appears they are strongly influenced by the activists in Egypt. For instance, @ShababLibya says on their info section of their Twitter account that they are "inspired by our brothers and sisters in Egypt and Tunis."The influence can be seen through their usage of the hashtag "#feb17," the day protests in Libya started, as one of the symbols of their movement. The activists in Egypt that I observed also used a hashtag of the day they began protests as a symbol for their movement. However, there also a lot of differences between these two groups of activists that I'll detail later.