The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is an organization founded in 1999 by a professor and a civil rights lawyer, both civil libertarians, to “…defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities.” They currently spend that vast majority of their resources tackling the issue of student and faculty speech on campuses though publicity campaigns, strategic litigation, and other legal avenues.

FIRE appears to follow a similar model of advocacy to groups like the ACLU or the EFF, but is somewhat more single-issue. Since I’m most familiar with the activities of FIRE, (I’m a donor!) I figured they’d be a good case study.

FIRE’s primary method of resource generation seems to be email. Like MoveOn and other similar organizations, periodic mass emails function to stir interest in the group’s activities and convince people to donate. These emails are almost exclusively about specific issues, seemingly designed to spur individuals with interest in particular cases to donate. This plays well to the monitorial model of citizenship, and closely resembles the actions of many other modern email-based campaigns.

Interestingly, the incentive to garner donations has encouraged FIRE to take a pseudo-journalistic role in addition to their advocacy. In order to send compelling emails, FIRE has to extensively research and document campus speech issues for their donors, to the point that the fire website is a decent source of news and information relating to the issue. The above-linked ACLU and EFF do the same thing.

In fact, sometimes the journalism IS the advocacy. Besides asking for donations, FIRE also uses mass emailing to spread news about important and sometimes time-sensitive information that may spur recipients to further action. For example, once, in response to a FIRE mailing, I sent a letter to the University of Tulsa urging them to reconsider a recent decision. This use of email is different from the donation-seeking use in that it encourages direct action on the part of recipients. The attention these activities bring to the issue helps to sway public opinion, and the mind of the administrators involved (hopefully).

While not a digital media, FIRE does notably still use physical mailings in addition to digital ones. These mailings are functionally similar to the emails, but manage to come off as more personal, probably because of the physical cost associated with sending them.

FIRE also has a social media presence, which they use to spread information. This information can be easily shared over user’s social networks, with provides both increased distribution and social capital, since you are seeing posts shared by your friends rather than mass emails.

FIRE uses the internet to help disseminate some of their publications. They publish several guides to various speech issues on their website, which they allow anyone to freely download.

The more I look into the specifics to FIRE’s operations, the more it becomes clear that they take a very traditional approach to their advocacy, with modest digital inroads to spread their popular appeal. Perhaps this is appropriate for a legally-minded foundation; it certainly seems to be similar to other civil rights organizations that continue to have important social impacts (ACLU, EFF). It seems to be effective for them, and I suspect I may donate again in the future, perhaps in response to some issue-based email.

I initially wanted to look into the internet activities of the “men going their own way” (MGTOW) movement, which is a delightfully crazy little online endeavor that has been described as “lesbian separatism for straight men.” In a nutshell, (and please provide your own air quotes where necessary) the basic ideology is or seems to be that since society is set up to favor women and because modern women are increasingly unattractive as mates, reasonable, sensible men should eschew all romantic relationships with the opposite sex and concentrate only on their own pursuits.

They’re totally nuts, but have somehow managed to hew out a corner of the internet for themselves using digital technology. I thought (and continue to think) that they would be a fun movement to pick apart and study, but I failed to find any sufficiently academic or even pseudo-academic sources describing their origins or history. (Exhibit A: I couldn’t find a better link than Urban Dictionary for MGTOW above.) My original research has led me to believe that the movement is centered on a number of forum-hosting websites devoted to MGTOW specifically and/or so-called men’s rights activism, along with certain corners of reddit.

While I wouldn’t say that the movement strikes me as particularly effective socially, the fact that such a movement has gained any purchase at all seems somewhat remarkable, and is probably almost entirely attributable to technology. Without the ability to anonymously connect with similarly minded people all over the country and world, it is unlikely that such a strange movement could have garnered nearly the attention that this one has. MGTOW may actually be a model case for the technology-mediated birth of a counterpublic, as humorous as that statement may seem.]