Trust and internet activism: From email to social networks

In the time of the fi rst edition of Cyberactivism, the use of the Internet for protest, activism, and organizing had only just begun. Technology was changing at a rapid pace, shifting from text-based to web-based, with the coming dominance of Facebook and Twitter still far off on the digital horizon. The earliest documented online protest, the case of Lotus MarketPlace, 1 was effective but limited to the text-only environments of email and Usenet newsgroups, where participants tended to be part of a small, elite group of computer users that shared similar values and were to some extent part of established online communities. In later cases, such as the Yahoo/Geocities protest, 2 the use of web pages that combined textual as well as visual information was fast becoming the norm.