ABSTRACT
Contemporary research on civic life has emphasized the changing place of the citizen in relation to politics, the state, and civil society. An important strand of this research has described how many of the assumptions of collective action are upended by the coordination enabled by widespread, networked digital media. And a useful framing of this shift has been the positing of new kinds of organizations, and new kinds of relationships with organizations available to late modern, digitally networked citizens. Using a dataset comprised of the online communications of several dozen civic organizations both established 'brick-and-mortar' and recently developed for Web activism 'online-only'. Then it examines exactly what actions organizations in the early digital era are calling on supporters to do. Another line of research should consider the possibility of very real impacts of expressive, networked communications themselves - viewing them not exclusively as opportunities for self-expression, but also as potentially instrumental deployments of power.
