Academic Writing and Critical Thinking – September 29, 2014
Assignment 4a - Draft
Joern Meier
Royal Roads University – Continuing Studies

Author Note
This assignment was prepared for Academic Writing and Critical Thinking, PAAP3858-A, taught by Jessica Michalofsky
Academic Writing and Critical Thinking – September 29, 2014
Assignment 4a - Draft
Final Paper
The almost omnipresent Internet transforms our lives, connecting us to family, friends, and the world in ways inconceivable only a few years ago. Through social media, we actively participate in creating, editing, and consuming a never-ending stream of data. Private corporations and protagonists of political or social change all vie to reach and engage highly targeted audiences. Can a social media campaign be an effective tool, helping recruit people to volunteer and become physical participants in lobbying for change? Two camps have emerged, with one side proclaiming that the new world of Internet activism transforms and extends activism in ways previously unthinkable, and the other camp insisting that Internet activism entices a new but widely disengaged audience that can be motivated to a lukewarm show of hands but not to real committed participation as seen in more traditional forms of activism. This debate is widely known as the 'activism vs. slacktivism' debate. However, it is rather short-sighted to approach this very complex subject matter with a plain black and white approach when every single byte offers 256 shades of grey to explore.
Gladwell (2010) argued for the slacktivism camp, stating that the strength of people's social ties is the key determinant in their willingness to assume risk in activist endeavors, because stronger social ties to other activists help form a group identity and reinforce the connection to the activist community. This led Gladwell (2010) to deduct that the strength of people's personal ties to other activists directly correlates to their willingness to accept personal risk in activism. Gladwell (2010) contended that the Internet is largely incapable of fostering the strong individual relationships necessary for highly motivated activism because of the weak social bindings of social media networks. According to him, the Internet is a very successful platform for initiatives requiring little personal sacrifice, but is no good at all at serious committed activism.
This argument fails to convince. Gladwell and his allies do not seem to realize that almost all conflicts resulting in movements for social or political change are anchored in the physical world. Activists motivated by strong social ties should not be less committed because of their access to social media, instead the Internet provides activists even in the eyes of Gladwell (2010) with a few extra tools. Even the voices for Internet-induced slacktivism do not dispute that the Internet age provides the highly motivated activist with some new tools.
We heard from the skeptics of Internet activism, but where do the believers in the transformative power of the Internet stand? Postmes and Brunsting (2002) argued that the Internet has transformed and strengthened activism, because new ever-evolving technologies provide the connections between causes and prospective activists by means of enhanced access to news, effective mass communication, and a number of ways to build new ties with likeminded people. Thus, rational and cognitive processes feed motivation and complement or even replace the need for strong social ties between participants engaged in truly committed forms of activism. As a logical consequence, Postmes and Brunsting (2002) reasoned that the Internet is changing society because people's cognitive processes, triggered by access to information and communication, replace the strong social ties that traditionally underpin committed activism. In simpler words, in the past, humanity used the herd instinct as the main driving force behind committed forms of activism. Thanks to the Internet, we climb another step or three on the evolutionary ladder, and simply do away with the herd instinct and replace it with reason. The argument, if put this way, does not sound particularly strong. What can be taken away is that social media is still evolving, that social media changes the way we – or most of us communicate, that social media is used in social and political activism, and that the Internet increases quantitative if not qualitative access to information.
The 2011 uprising in Egypt was in many ways a traditional brick-and-mortar revolution, but with a cyber-twist to it: based on their statistical analysis of a large body of tweets related to the 2011 uprising in Egypt, Starbird and Palen (2012) observed that activists used Twitter as an important tool to share ideas and information with like-minded people, because Twitter allows a high number of activists interact using its retweet and other mechanisms. In this case, Twitter was used among participants and supporters of a traditional mass movement to bypass government controlled communication channels to communicate with the world and among themselves. Starbird and Palen (2012) argued that during the 2011 Egyptian uprising, tweet -based expressions of solidarity, especially in the form of memes and their retweeting, directly fed back into people's motivation for action, because they demonstrated a collective effort in support of the cause that was recognized by frontline activists. It is not farfetched to assume that the use of social media played an important role in strengthening the resolve of frontline activists in their month long struggle. Twitter is only one tool that online activists may use: McCafferty (2011) observed that online activists are using a wide variety of social media to reach intended audiences including blogs and mobile apps, while presenting data in various tailored digital formats.
It appears that social media campaigns can be an effective tool, at least when used in conjunction with more traditional means of activism. However, a big decentralized mass movement in immediate need can afford to adopt its social media of choice by acclamation, whereas a smaller homegrown non-profit society has to carefully select the right tools, be cognizant of target audiences and their communication profiles in order to choose the right approaches to reach and engage potential participants. Social media is all about real-time or near-real-time communication. A carefully planned and executed social media campaign with any chance of success requires a long-term commitment in skills, talent, and significant ongoing human and fiscal resources to keep the campaign fresh, relevant, and interesting. Without this continued commitment, it is more than likely that what began as activism will fizzle out into slacktivsm.
References
Gladwell, M. (2010, October 4). Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ McCafferty, D. (2011). Activism vs. slacktivism. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 54 (12), 17-19. Retrieved from http://mags.acm.org/communications/201112/?pg=19#pg18
Postmes, T., & Brunsting, S. (2002). Collective action in the age of the Internet: Mass communication and online mobilization. Social Science Computer Review, 20(3), 290-301. doi:10.1177/089443930202000306
Starbird, K & Palen, L. (2012). (How) will the revolution be retweeted: Information diffusion and the 2011 Egyptian uprising. Proceedings of Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2012. Seattle, Washington. Retrieved from https://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/StarbirdPalen_RevolutionRetweeted.pdf