Electronic civil disobedience essay

In seventeenth century China, the “ Revolt of the Three Feudatories” is a well documented revolt of three feudal lords when they were threatened to lose their power to the emperor. Their revolt led to eight years of violent struggle between the Qing dynasty and the feudal lords. However, when talking about non-violent civil disobedience, one good example can be found in the Christian Bible. The story of Daniel is an example of civil disobedience where Daniel disobeyed the king’s law on practicing religion and was consequently thrown into the den of the lions. Many of history’s martyrs (as well as martyrs from religion) are good examples of peaceful civil disobedience.

Studying the histories and folklore of nations and societies – big or small, present or ancient – we find civil protest and civil disobedience to be an ever-present chapter (and often a major one at that). We observe nation-changing movements, such as revolutions, often started out as small sparks of civil protests and civil disobediences. Of course, not all civil disobediences end in revolution, but nonetheless many leave their mark in the history and, probably, the character of a society.

ECD has possibilities of physical influences or outcomes through a series of chain reactions. However, physical influence is not the intended goal but just side effect. Main goal of ECD is resistance through use of sources that are intangible, creating maximum reaction through minimum means. These resources are included with electronic information and systems in cyber space that do not need physical contact among people. But still, the past generations and even the present generations are closely attached to the physical action such as protests. Liberation Barbie Project is a great example of ECD that has been successful in bringing about maximum result with minimum means.

This was a project initiated by UCSD Visual Arts graduate students. Goal was simple: to tell as many US citizens that type-casting of genders unacceptable. They used less than ten real Barbie dolls and G.

This is a future concern for ECD: how to expand influence to the whole world. However, in the countries that have achieved high percentage of cyber networking, information technology started to naturally restrict controlling power of institutions. As information was free flowing and readily available, it became harder to control formations of civil groups. Virtual interaction eliminated the necessity to physical gather to form and share thoughts. Not only by information technology, other communication tools such as cellular phone made easier to effectively transmit information across wide distances. Although actions taken by ECD are non-violent, tools used by ECD can be used achieve violence of great scale.

This can be considered cyber terrorism. As any citizens can, terrorists can also get a good hold of the electronic resources available almost everywhere. An example that proves the fearful power of ill-used information technology is the terrorist act of 9.

Even now, there are many ECD groups forming within the Internet. An example of recent ECD group action is the California Gas Price Protest. In order to get the message across to the government that the hiked up prices are not acceptable to the consumers, a group decided to stunt the government server by logging into a specified site. Cyberspace is continually growing and expanding. ECD continues to be a driving force in directing the path of the electronic world.

The presence of ECD will eventually strengthen through time as long as cyberspace continues to expand. It will grow to be world-influencing power as network spreads into all countries. Sources: Support Health Care for AllRetrieved on June 01, 2007 fromhttp://bang. calit2. net/YES2HealthCare/Definition on Akhenatin and Meme.