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Astroturf, Technology And The Future Of Community Mobilization: Implications For Nonprofit Theory, John Mcnutt, Katherine Boland
Astroturf, Technology And The Future Of Community Mobilization: Implications For Nonprofit Theory, John Mcnutt, Katherine Boland
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
Nonprofit Organizations advocate for the poor, the disenfranchised and the oppressed. This process is thought to build social capital and civil society, while engendering the development of social skills and deliberation. In recent years, scholars have observed that nonprofit advocacy organizations have moved from membership associations to professionalized policy change organizations. Virtual advocacy will move the process farther afield. Astroturf, the creation of synthetic advocacy efforts, continues this process further. All of this has troubling implications for nonprofit organizations and nonprofit theory. This paper describes the astroturf phenomenon, reviews pertinent nonprofit theory and speculates on the impact of astroturf for …
Practice In The Electronic Community, Roger A. Lohmann, John Mcnutt
Practice In The Electronic Community, Roger A. Lohmann, John Mcnutt
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
The Internet was at its inception a commons rather than a marketplace. Increasingly, however, communitarian notions have been overwhelmed by the internet as one huge shopping arcade. The potential is certainly there for this amazing technology to advance the causes of human freedom well-being and community. At the same time, however, this powerful set of technologies that in less than a decade have become nearly universal in scope and sweep, have the potential also to become simply another extension of the global economic marketplace. Far worse, there is also the potential to become a power tool for class domination or …