Competition, Innovation, and Proliferation: How Social Movements Make the Transition from Competing in the Streets and Newspapers to the Internet.

The latter half of the 1990s was an exceedingly interesting time for Israeli peace and settler movements. The rapid turnover in governments, policies and security was accompanied by an even more rapid turnover in communications technology. While by 2003 nearly all of the competing movements had created websites, they certainly did not make the decision to go on-line at the same time. Moreover, the innovations they chose to adopt vary considerably. This study surveys fourteen websites (7 peace movement and 7 settler movement) from 1996 through 2003 with two goals in mind. First, to describe the development of the websites. Second, to apply Peleg?s (2000) movement-countermovement model to how social movements choose to develop websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]