R8: Activism Online

Thought the last 10 years of the 21st Century, social media has gone from an obscure website that few of us would use to share pictures and text to now a powerful force in our daily lives. There are even some who argue that this new platform on the Internet has created a space that can expand activism in a way that could have never been dreamed of before. Some people, like Malcolm Gladwell, do not believe this to be the case. As he wrote in his essay, ”There is strength in weak ties… but weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism." (Gladwell). To me, this weakens the perception that a lot of people should have of social media. The fact that we are able to make so many ties online through minimal effort is what builds an audience, informs the masses, and eventually starts bringing people out into the streets.

Over the last few years, movements like “Black Lives Matter” have been coming more and more into the public light. Not only because the side of activism is shared on social media but also the causes they are fighting for are going public as well. Thought the last few years, we have witnessed horrible videos of unarmed African Americans who have been gunned down by police officers. Before the time of the Internet, very few people ever saw these kinds of videos. And before everyone had a camera with them all the time, nobody ever saw these kind of incidents unless they happened during a protest. Kwane Opam put it best when he said, ”I’m mindful that we aren’t born woke, something wakes us up, and for so many people, what woke them up was a tweet or a Facebook post, an Instagram post, a picture." (Opam).

Even though Gladwell claims that these weak ties over social media will rarely lead to high risk activism, that still means a few people who wouldn't go into activism before will because of what they see online. Back in the days, very few people would be willing to do things that could potentially put them in harms way. But now even more people can find out about a cause and make that decision for themselves. By allowing the people to be informed by social media of different problems and being linked with others through social media to solve different problems, isn’t that exactly what activism is supposed to bring about? A generation of people who are united on a cause and are doing whatever is in their power to solve it. In some ways, it almost seems like social media is the tool that protesters and activists could only dream of having. 

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm. "Small Change." The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 12 May 2015. Web. 04 May 2017.

Opam, Kwame. "DeRay Mckesson on Black Lives Matter and Building Tools for Digital Activism | Verge 2021." TheVerge.com. The Verge, 29 Nov. 2016. Web. 04 May 2017.