Social Media & Social Activism. Social Media and Social Activism. Social-media-revolution. Tweet. Social-media-revolution. Social Media and Social Activism. Nicomcallister. Social Media Workshop. Gladwell on Social Media and Activism - Alexis C. Madrigal. I really like Malcolm Gladwell's new piece on digital political organizing. It's got an excellent structure, alternating scenes of the lunch counter protests of the 1960s with ideas about the loose social groups that activists attempt to catalyze on Facebook and Twitter. His big point is weak-tie networks don't have the dedication and structure to take on an established power structure. Martin Luther King, Jr, he notes, had a one million dollar budget and 100 staff members on the ground when he got to Birmingham. I found myself surprised at how much I liked the piece. I'm a big fan of Clay Shirky, whose various writings about the potential of the Internet as an organizing platform would seem to run directly contrary to Gladwell's thesis.
Certainly, the strong form of his argument -- that Twitter and Facebook make it harder to organize -- seems unsupported (at least in this article). But there are two threads of his story, in particular, that leave a lot to be desired. This feels thin. Social Media Activism: Not A Cause Worth Getting Behind. A spate of school sexual molestation cases in China have been uncovered recently by the media there. Over a 20-day period, eight cases of schoolkids being sexually molested by faculty or government officials have been reported, bringing forward the very important issue of child abuse in the nation.
Disgusted and outraged Chinese citizens started an online campaign condemning the assaults by adults who are in a position of trust or power. But some Chinese netizens have taken to their Weibo accounts to participate in a strange "social activism" against such crimes, telling principals and other would-be assaulters to “get a room with me, let go of your students!” And giving their contact information. Of course, these would-be activists don’t actually want to be contacted -- the campaign was designed to troll criminals via a kind of “pick on someone your own size” message.
Ye Haiyan started the trend that has since gone viral on the social media platform. Inside Indonesia - a quarterly magazine on Indonesia and its people, culture, politics, economy and environment. Indonesia is Facebooking, Twittering and blogging, but what effect is this having on campaigns for social justice? Indonesia is online. The number of Indonesians using the internet increased from two million in 2000 to over 55 million in 2012, the fourth largest number of internet users in Asia (after China, India and Japan). Thushara Dibley This phenomenal growth in access to the internet has been supported by a rapidly growing economy as well as the widespread uptake of mobile phone technology.
In 2011 a Nielsen report indicated that 48 per cent of Indonesia’s internet users went online via their mobile phones and another 13 per cent used some other type of handheld device. Indonesian ‘netizens’ have also keenly taken to new social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere. In fact, Indonesians are the fourth biggest users of Facebook and the fifth biggest users of Twitter worldwide. The final two articles in the edition take a more critical perspective. Twitter, Facebook, and social activism. At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.
They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. Activism On Social Media. Four Ways Social Media Is Redefining Activism. Social Media Activism.
Chap%204%20-%20Carroll%20'Democratic%20Media%20Activism...' Tweets and the Streets | Social Media and Contemporary Activism.