Political change and the internet in Australia: introducing GetUp

This chapter explores how the internet can be used in innovative ways to challenge established relationships of contact between citizens and their parliamentary representatives. Net Working/Networking explores the variety in use and approaches to political participation and mobilisation occurring on the Internet. The Internet is viewed as a tool, channel and forum enabling citizens to make an impact on social, cultural and political change. Civic empowerment through the Internet emerges in people's everyday life. Big politics is broken into pieces to become a multitude of small, more personalised political engagements. The Internet is a powerful medium for gathering coalitions and organising mobilisations of all kinds. It also transforms political styles and types of activities. The chapters in the book represent various viewpoints mixing theory with empirical cases. Topics addressed range from e-democratic participation to Internet piracy. The main focus of the studies in this book is to highlight the potential capacity of computer-mediated communication to increase people power. The Internet is crucially embedded in the activities of the multi-level political life-world and hardly any dedicated actor (or actors who want to influence public matters) can overlook its importance to contemporary politics. Our purpose is to outline political struggles arising from citizens' own experiences of creating virtual open spaces that they shape in personally distinctive ways.