5. Activating the Digital Campaigner
Using Social Media as a platform to further activism and campaigning is an ever-growing trend in the evolving digital era. Political movement is easily facilitated through this tool that spans the globe, allowing various opportunities for anecdotal stories to surface on the highly individualised, personal platforms that exist, such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
In his āTheories of Changeā, James Whelan provides a formulaic approach to creating a campaign vision, simply āIFā the community takes action, āTHENā change will occur, āBECAUSEā of a factual logic (Whelan, 2020). This provides a clear point of evidence to how these social media campaigns for activism should be run, providing focused motives and a call to action. Perhaps the most difficult part of these campaigns is maintaining a momentum once a following is found, through the economy of clicks, subscriptions, likes, shares and so on. Within this, there is a necessity for a balance of both online and offline activism, whilst a campaigner can be active online, without physical action no real change will occur and the campaign long forgotten.
āA new, politically engaged generation of activists with a slate of creative tactics at the ready" (Alvarez N., Lauzon C., Zaiontz K., 2019) are thus born within this new landscape for activism with easy access to social media. Most pointedly in recent memory, the School Strike for Climate demonstrates this activated youth driven to political action through social media. Greta Thunberg, the face of youth Climate Activism, helped to coordinate a worldwide strike by school students on the topic of climate emergency and inaction of global governments on the issue. As such, thousands of cities around the world were flooded with youth protesting for their future, emphasising both the power and impact of social media facilitating activism, allowing a focused mass to go to action to create change.
Further Reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/climate/global-climate-strike.html
Alvarez N., Lauzon C., Zaiontz K. (2019) 'On Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: An Introduction'. In: Alvarez N., Lauzon C., Zaiontz K. (eds)Ā Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan
Whelan, James,Ā Change Agency and director of Community Organising Fellowship, "Theories of Change".Ā www.thechangeagency.org/theories-of-change/
