E.B. Boyd has a fascinating piece at AlterNet on the use of Google Maps as a mobilizing tool. The article describes efforts by Rebecca Moore to convince her neighbors to mobilize against a logging plan under consideration in the Santa Cruz mountains. Moore, a Google employee (important part of the story), used Google Earth tools to create a visual 3-D tour of the proposed logging area that she presented at a community meeting of 300 residents. Here’s Boyd’s depiction of that meeting:

At first the audience was quiet. But as soon as Moore began to guide the room through the canyon they all knew, people started leaning forward. Real images of the actual trees, roads and buildings in their community popped up. The logging area was marked in a translucent red, clearly bumping up right next to the roads, homes and businesses where audience members lived and played. Using Google Earth’s ruler tool, Moore showed them exactly how far logging would take place from their houses and communities. She showed them the locations of proposed helicopter landing pads for logs that couldn’t be removed by truck and demonstrated how closely timber-laden choppers might pass the local day care center and schools.

This speaks to an understudied area of research: the use of on-line tools to overcome collective action barriers to mobilization. Public policy/social problem scholars emphasize the role of frames, stories, narratives, tropes, etc. in getting individuals to contribute resources to a collective effort. But very little research (that I know of anyway) looks at how the ways in which those stories are presented have an impact on overcoming collective action. An interesting line of research would look at how and when on-line tools are effective at mobilizing constituencies. What are the conditions? Does this only work for NIMBY efforts? Can people be mobilized to act upon issues in which they are not directly impacted?