VEDRES, Balázs

Organizing technologies : genre forms of online civic association in eastern europe - Thousand Oaks : SAGE, January 2005

How do civic associations in Eastern Europe organize themselves online? Based on data collected on 1,585 East European civil society Web sites, the authors identify five emergent genres of organizing technologies: newsletters, interactive platforms, multilingual solicitations, directories, and brochures. These clusters do not correspond to stages of development. Moreover, newer Web sites are more likely to be typical of their genre, suggesting that forms are becoming more distinctive. In contrast to the utopian image of a de-territorialized, participatory global civil society, the authors' examination of the structure of hyperlinks finds that transnational types of Web sites are not inclined to be participatory. Whereas others paradigms focus on inequality in the accessibiity of Web sites to potential users through search engine technology and show how this varies across different types of civil society Web sites.