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Slacktivism
Social Change
Does Not Just
Come From
Social Media
Sarah Watling
Alan Patterson Public
Speaking Competition
Highly Commended
12
Slacktivism. I must admit that when I first heard this word, I too was
a little bit confused. It’s not about child vaccinations, child soldiers, or
the beloved topic of drugs in sport. It’s about when you arrive on
Facebook and see the depressing post of, ‘like this if you think
endangered otters should be saved,’ ‘my daughter thinks she’s ugly,
like this if you think she’s beautiful,’ and my personal favourite, ‘my
brother doesn’t have any friends; like this if you want to be his friend.’
In fact, these are all very touching and sad realities, but in truth, your
like will not save the otters, rectify self esteem issues, and you will
never truly be his friend. Yes, that’s right ,Slacktivism stands for slack
activism and I think it’s pretty clear that this wave of activism is too
passive to make a difference and results from the failure of anyone to
really want to take a risk with their beliefs.
Manyof youwill be familiarwith thenewworldwidephenomenon;
the make-up free selfie. On various forms of social media, women of
all ages have been posting pictures of themselves without make-up.
They then nominate someone else to do the same. This whole
concept is roughly linked to breast-cancer awareness, yet author
Emily Buchanan states that
if anything, it was trivialising a very serious
issue and using it to justify a vanity project. She says that if we do something that
dresses itself up as altruism, we feel good. And when it’s so easy, why wouldn’t we?
Take a picture, post it to Facebook, good deed done for the day. Aren’t I wonderful?
Yet, this form of activism is cowardly and it is disengaging society
from the real action, which happens on the streets, not from the
security of our bedrooms. We must make the distinction between
activism and social awareness. Whilst the make up free selfie is fine
for building empathy and recognition, we’d have to be kidding
ourselves to think that this is actually making is difference to the way
we lead our lives.
The revolutionary wave of protests throughout Bahrain, Syria,
Iraq and more, known as the Arab Spring, used social media in their
activism attempts. However, this was only done in order to organise
protests, rallies and demonstrations. I think the issue is that our
mentality has changed so that we believe that social media was the
reason for this revolutionary success. However, in reality the real
action was on the street; where something was at stake, where there
was risk and where this sacrifice was their lives. These people
exhibited so much more courage and strength than we give them
credit for. The development of social media has developed a laziness