MoveOn and the New Front of Grassroots Activism :: Essays Papers

MoveOn and the New Front of Grassroots Activism This election year, a new style of grassroots activism has risen up to a very strong position. When the two owners of computer software company Berkeley Systems (made famous for the After Dark flying toaster screensaver and the popular game You Don’t Know Jack) decided to sell their company for $14 million dollars, they were unaware of what their future held. In 1998, during the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades decided to put together a list of names in effort to petition Congress to reprimand Clinton and then â€Å"move on.† When their list grew to more than 300,000 names within one month, they knew they had something big on their hands. Although their efforts concerning the Clinton impeachment failed, they were not about to give up. They went on to protest the 2000 presidential election campaign, raise $2 million to air a television ad called â€Å"Child’s Pay† during the Super Bowl (which was denied by CBS due to its policy against issue advertisements), and then to go up against President George W. Bush concerning the war in Iraq. MoveOn is best known by its website (www.moveon.org), which has drawn millions of visitors since it was established. Though many Republicans and some Democrats protest MoveOn’s so-called â€Å"extremist† advertising, there is no doubt about it: grassroots campaigning had a new face. With MoveOn’s overwhelming success, other smaller activist groups began springing up all over the Internet in effort to catch some of MoveOn’s success. The fact is many of them are doing just that. The Internet is slowly becoming the largest political campaign tool available. And with the ease of connecting with millions of people with the simple click of a button, the voices grassroots activists is more powerful than ever before. MoveOn’s next mission is by way of mass telephone calls, hoping to reach 800,000 people a day. MoveOn plans on beginning these calls in late October. How is this possible? MoveOn has created a way in which volunteers (both old and new) dial a toll-free number, punch in their special identification number, hear a brief message concerning the strategy of their calls for that day, and then be instantly connected to an American somewhere.