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- 31 January, 2012 -
- Economics -
- Tags : protest, social media
- 1 Comment
image: flickr member anonymous9000
Watts Martin explains what gets him twitching about #protest #hashtags on Twitter, and I would actually expand that to surround my own reasoning for not wanting anything to do with the Occupy protests: they are often used and performed from a point of total naiveté.
Watts points out a few things that have set my teeth grinding about slacktivism (using your online social profiles to feel that you’re creating a protest movement):
- changing your avatar, which does literally nothing for anyone
- signing online petitions without first understanding where those petitions go, or what legislators actually pay attention to in terms of communication
- protesting Twitter’s censorship, without understanding that Twitter is actually complying with the censorship rules thrown at it. Google’s not censoring, governments are.
My own problems with half-understood activism of this sort, as it relates to Occupy, were that I found it incredibly galling that so-called one-percenters were globally portrayed as top-skimming opportunists. (None of them legitimately staretd businesses and created jobs..?) Ninety-nine percenters were almost always portrayed as hapless victims. (None of them are lazy opportunists who prefer to simply coast?)
It just isn’t true, and comes from a position of generalization. And misunderstanding your protest points is what sinks a movement every time. The thing I find most dangerous about social media in a protest scenario is that it creates the emotional fiction for the user that they are actually participating in something larger than themselves in a real, viable way.
Sometimes, yes, that happens: SOPA and PIPA got great reactions because of Twitter. But most times, you’re just making yourself feel better by howling into a search result.
the avatar changing and petition signing, ugh. in the last few months, i’ve seen a lot of protest pages that incorporate free instant phone calls to legislators—those i really love, both because they actually require you to take more than a minute of your time out to do something before you get to pat yourself on your back, and because they result in something non-internetty, that politicians actually count and give a shit about.