Back in the days, the only means to spread information about
various things to the world was through newspaper, television or by word of
mouth, which was very slow and ineffective, if you compare it to what it is
now. News from one country reaches the people of other countries even sooner
than it goes on the news channels-that’s how fast it has become with all thanks
to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Because of this, activism
has also taken a different form altogether with faster news travel and the fact
that everyone has one common ground when it comes to promoting activism online,
also known as digital or online activism.
Digital
activism usually has a great impact towards the movement and is mostly done
through mobile phones, social media, micro-blogging, blogging and online petitions.
Even though sometimes, the action to a situation needs to be taken in person,
digital activism plays a huge role in getting the initial action started or
spreading awareness about the situation. But, as mentioned in Digital and
Online Activism, “Where digital activism enjoys the biggest success is when it
is used as a complementary tool to offline action or is used as the
introductory method to encourage people to engage in offline action.” This is
true, and it has been tried and tested in various incidents, one of which is
the case of the story of Ukrainian Uprising (http://digital-activism.org/2014/02/the-story-of-ukrainian-uprising/)
which was an ongoing wave of protests and digital activism always had a big
hand in it. The protests started with an aim to force the government of Viktor
Yanukovych to sign an EU trade deal.
Alongside offline protests and rallies, Twitter, YouTube and
Facebook kept inspiring and motivating the people until his government fell and
he went into hiding.
As a
person who doesn’t usually read the newspaper, I find digital activism useful
because I stay aware about what happens around the globe even without reading
the newspaper. In the kind of lives we have today, most people can’t support
the causes they want to offline, and digital activism just makes it super
convenient for them to show support by the click of a mouse. What more do we
want?
I agree digital activism plays a huge role by bring awareness to many issues today. What I have found to be ineffective in many cases it does not bring an action with the awareness of change. Once something else occur in the media or on the social media highway its forgotten. Until something happens again.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your saying "In the kind of lives we have today, most people can’t support the causes they want to offline". For example, we live far away from our countries, and no matter how we want to take to the street and to join rallies, we can't. Though I wonder if just clicking is effective, sometimes that is only way for us to support the cause.
ReplyDelete