一塊地 Piece of Land

For the past decade, cybersphere has played an important role for activism(as cyberactivism). The 30 November (N30) protesters against the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 denoted the significant use of the Web to organize, publicise and mobilize[1]. As a social media addict, I have been following environmental protection groups (EPGs) on my Facebook and Twitter which made me ‘a virtual environmentalist’. More than a passive news feed receiver, I hope to understand the cyber activism of radical EPGs, such as Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth, which mainly aim for donations and volunteerism for their operations.

I know the contemporary thinker Manuel Castells via Graham Meikle’s book, Future Active: Media activism and the Internet. Meikle refers to Castells in several occasions when mentioning of political movements in the cyberspace, as social movements in social transformations have been a long-term focus in Castells’s work since the 70s. As a sociologist, Castells studied the dynamics transforming the fabric of our everyday life around the globe. His theory of the network society provides a framework to connect the very diverse phenomena from the globalization of production to the renewal of democracy at a local scale. Social movement is one of the central arguments in Castells’s The Information Age[2]. In the tension between the Net and the self, people attempt to redefine social values and create meaning, and the state’s intervention in the processes are also issues that present in Castells’s work. 

...(full text @ here)