An electronic heiress to Erin Brokovich’s legacy, Joy Towles Ezell uses a suite of Yahoo! groups to rally her neighbors and hound polluters in her rural Florida community. She’s today’s interview guest.

“I can build a following on the Internet where people can get the real truth… without it being whitewashed and without parts of it being left out.”

That’s the belief that has motivated Joy since the first days of the Internet in early 1990s. Today she maintains the “Hope for Clean Water” Yahoo! listserv and two others about environmental threats to her Florida community.

Joy turned to the Internet to connect with others who shared her interests as far back as 1991, when going online meant making a long distance call to California. The first issue to awaken her inner-activist was dioxin – which laced the effluent discharged by a local paper mill. As her neighbors started dialing in, she realized the Internet had become a viable alternative to her hometown newspaper, which treated this large employer with deference.

“The environmental movement has really evolved from… people talking to each other,” Joy says. And like other online community leaders, she sees great inherent value in dialogue and debate. “I like ‘em to be lively. I like people to post things and I like people to discuss different sides of an issue and really get it out in the open.”

“We know they’re watching, and this is good,” she says about polluters. She sees her thriving community as a show of community strength to “to scare the hell out of them.”

Joy feeds discussion on her listservs with an elaborate system of Google News alerts that she has set up. Each night, she spends an hour or more sorting through stories to share with her lists.

“It’s where democracy is really practiced now,” Joy says. “It used to be that to practice democracy, you had to go to the courthouse steps and get together with a bunch of people and you had to discuss things that way. Now you can still do that, but you don’t get to talk to as many people.”

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