Information Technology and Human Rights Networked Advocacy
The widespread availability of the internet, mobile telephones, and related communications technologies enabling users to overcome the transaction costs of collective action has begun to change the previous models of advocacy.
Due to information technology and its ability to provide an abundance of information, there are fewer to no costs for group forming. Coordination is now much easier for human rights organizations to track human rights violators and use the information to advocate for those in need.
One effect is that it is harder for governments to block information they do not want their citizens to obtain. The increase in technology makes it nearly impossible for information not to penetrate everyone around the globe making it easier for human rights organizations to monitor and ensure rights are being protected.
In addition, the fact that the Internet provides a platform for easy group forming, the use of an institutional organization is not essential. With social networking sites and blogs, any individual can perpetuate collective action with the right tools and audience. The need for a hierarchy is diminishing with the great abundance of information available.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights Activists
Famous quotes containing the words information, technology, human and/or rights:
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
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“Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”
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“The superstition respecting power and office is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way, and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but because it is their state and natural end.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Quite often ... these little guys, who might be making atomic weapons or who might be guilty of some human rights violation ... are looking for someone to listen to their problems and help them communicate.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)