Tool for or source of action? A social psychological perspective on the influence of virtual worlds on reality

Abstract

Social movements are, especially since the revolution in Egypt, often linked to the mobilizing “power” of the Internet. Very frequently, the Internet is viewed as a tool to coordinate and organize such actions. The aim of this article is to extend this perspective and introduce a framework of explicit and implicit mechanisms that can enforce a transfer of online actions off–line. We relate the proposed framework to the behavior model of persuasive design to identify necessary conditions for this transfer.