A Social Movement for Privacy/Against Surveillance - Some Difficulties in Engendering Mass Resistance in a Land of Twitter and Tweets
Laura Huey · Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons (Case Western Reserve University) · 2010
Despite increased awareness of both privacy and surveillance issues and the forms of resistance frequently generated, little attention has been paid to the failure of issue advocates to spawn a larger pro-privacy/antisurveillance movement in North America.In this paper, I examine three inter-related factors that I see as potentially inhibiting the generation of a pro-privacy/anti-surveillance social movement in North America.Drawing on social movements theory, I suggest that those seeking to develop such a social movement need to: (1) demonstrate to a wider audience that a problem exists that requires individual and collective action; (2) carefully consider how to frame the problem and, thus, the nature of the movement; and(3) set careful boundaries to delimit the nature and scope of the problem.