SPRED ORDET! Betydningen af sms i kampen om Ungdomshuset

The sms (Short Message Service) is an aspect of technological change that has created new forms of social interaction, and a novel phenomenon in Danish society: the spread of chain-sms. Chain-sms has helped to channel, shape and change ordinary people’s ways of creating groups and communities and also how social movements organize protests.
Fear-stricken teenage girls, youngsters illegally organizing parties in other peoples’ properties, rural protest groups and the protest movement linked to the youth centre “Ungdomshuset” in Copenhagen are among those groups who have used chain-sms as a tool for interaction. During periods of March 2007, ten to forty different chain messages were circulating daily among protesters. These sms show the ways that roles and external relations have been constructed by protesters, as well as how solidarity and internal relations of power can be shaped and changed by chain-sms. Interestingly, the complex networks of simultaneous chain messages seem to constitute a framework for discussion and decision-making by a kind of popular referendum by way of sms.