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Critical Analysis Post #3 - Week 6: Digital Citizenship 2: Activism and protest

Source: <http://blog.actionsprout.com/social-media-slacktivism-nonprofits/>.

          Do we underestimate or overestimate the power of social media when it comes to activism? Can it really be the most effective way to start a revolution in this day and age? There have been many instances where social media has been used as a tool to instigate political change, but some may say that this can discredit the actions done by those in real life – those who stand up and do something about it (Gerbaudo 2012). After the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, journalists were quick to credit the power social media had in uniting the public (Youmans & York 2012).

          Certainly, it gave affordances to the public such as lowering geographical boundaries for activist communication, physical gatherings could be organised and member morale could be maintained. Conversely, there can be security risks when relying on social media for such tasks. To be effective, social media might only be best when used alongside an activist movement, as there is also a risk that there will be inaction in real life despite a strong campaign online (Youmans & York 2012).

Source: <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/01/201112515334871490.html>.

The Dangers of Social Media Activism

          Social media may enable activists to communicate and have their voice be heard. However, as many social media companies are based in the US, the security and information laws differ from those of foreign countries. According to Youmans and York (2012), foreign governments request these US companies to surrender user data or to remove content from their service. Any successful attempts to do so may reveal the identities of anonymous activists and can especially cause harm if that information was leaked to the public or they were arrested due to a lack of freedom of speech laws.

          Additionally, the algorithms or reporting mechanisms on social media such as YouTube may cause activist content to be temporarily or permanently suspended, thus losing the material’s strength in reach or relevance. During the Syrian uprisings, videos capturing the brutal violence of the regime were posted but taken down due to it violating YouTube’s policies in regards to showing graphic content. However these policies were adjusted to ensure that videos in this context could stay, as to not hide the truth of the events.

Slacktivism and You

Source: <http://www.disaster-ology.com/home/2015/12/2/in-contemplation-of-activism-and-defense-of-slacktivism-revisited>.

          ‘Slacktivism’ describes the act of putting a minimal amount of effort toward a cause, often for a person to feel like they contributed without actually doing anything. If anything, it helps with awareness of a cause, but rarely does it go further. A perfect example of this would be the social media craze surrounding Kony 2012, a campaign that put all of its effort into the marketing and hardly anything toward reaching their goal of finding and arresting warlord Joseph Kony (Kligler-Vilenchik & Thorson 2015). 

          Another campaign that struggled with slacktivism was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Many were happy to take part in the challenge, however many either dropped the ‘ALS’ when referring to it, or did not actually know what ALS was or what the challenge was for. The public were distracted with taking part in the challenge, and unfortunately not many were donating money, which was what the campaign was intended to encourage.

Source: <https://au.pinterest.com/divagirlrobin/ice-bucket-challenge/>.

References

Gerbaudo, P 2012, Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism, Pluto Press, London.

Kligler-Vilenchik, N & Thorson, K 2015, ‘Good citizenship as a frame contest: Kony2012, memes, and critiques of the networked citizen’, New Media and Society, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 1993-2011.

Youmans, W & York, J 2012, 'Social media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the information infrastructure of modern social movements', Journal of Communication, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 315-329.

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Post 3

‘Digital citizenship 2: activism and protest’

Beginning this post, I thought it might be interesting to try to find an example of digital activism which wasn’t mentioned in either the lecture or the readings. However, after going through the reading a bit more meticulously, I realised there were such a vast amount of examples that they most likely cover everything recent so I should just pick from there; but researching into the reading’s example is what ended up leading me to a new concept anyway, ‘guerrilla archiving’.

Guerrilla archiving is a new term, but an old mission. It involves preserving documents, data, and therefore worldview and history of a group facing oppression. ‘This work challenges the dominant narratives of the past and makes us rethink how we preserve memories for the next generation’ (Currie and Paris, 2017).

In its most recent form, it seems to exist against a different angle of the phenomenon of digital activism than what the readings and lectures discussed, but it is similar in ways we don’t at first think of.

Guerrilla archiving, along with the organisation Global Voice from the readings, seem to belong to a different angle of the phenomenon of digital activism than the other revolutions in the readings and lecture, but ‘for these activists, archival work is not a neutral act, but a form of political disruption’.

While in the cases of the indignados or the Occupy Movements, social media was used to gain awareness of the cause, and to orchestrate demonstrations of resistance in the flesh-and-blood world, in the case of guerrilla archiving, the entire war is being played out in the virtual sphere.

As Currie and Paris, of the University of California explain, ‘Within hours of Trump’s inauguration ceremony, official statements on anthropogenic, or man-made, climate change vanished from governmental websites, including whitehouse.gov and that of the Environmental Protection Agency’ (Currie and Paris, 2017). So along with hundreds of groups across the United States, they got together to protest the new U.S. administration. However, they weren’t protesting in the streets, but instead inside in the university; ‘harvesting’, ‘seeding’, ‘scraping’ and archiving websites and data sets related to climate change.

This event; supervised by the international network the ‘Environmental Data Governance Initiative’ along with the ‘University of Pennsylvania’s Program for Environmental Humanities’, was part of dozens cropping up across the U.S. They are often held by universities, which use social media to attract participants, because lots of help is needed.

I guess there is something else strange with lots of the guerrilla archiving events being held in Universities, by students and professors. The Gerbaudo reading discusses the Egyptian uprising, the Spanish indignados, and the Occupy Movement. Gerbaudo suggests the three social movements were successful because ‘they were considered to be ‘popular’ movements: movements which appeal to the ‘people’ (Gerbaudo 2012, p.10). Occupy Movement were ‘the 99%’, the Egyptians uprising were ‘one hand’, and the indignados represented ‘normal’ Spaniards (Gerbaudo 2012, p.10).

Therefore, it is strange that this activism seemed a bit more restricted to the university-going classes. However; we must allow that the data on climate change which they were rescuing was once a part of the most easily and widely reaching information source; and that very educated people were also invested in the other examples.

References:

Currie M, and Paris B, 2017, ‘How the ‘guerrilla archivists’ saved history – and are doing it again under Trump’, The Conversation, 22/2, viewed 2/4/17, <http://theconversation.com/how-the-guerrilla-archivists-saved-history-and-are-doing-it-again-under-trump-72346>.

Paolo Gerbaudo, 2012, Tweets and the Streets, Pluto Press, London.

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