This week turns the discussion towards a new topic of interest i.e. Digital Activism and Social Justice. The material provided was quite interesting and I really enjoyed while listening the Ted Talks. I am going to share with you all what I have found interesting and some key points to think on.
Starting from the Digital Activism and Ted Talks, I have found the Ted Talk, “Digital Activism: using technology to Empower Change” by Darrick Morrison quite interesting because Derick talks about the most empowered generation and the idea of leveraging traditionally inspirational events to create the infrastructure to change. He added that machine learning accelerates the discovery, crowd-funding allows people to pursue their passions easier than they were before and social media is giving us the opportunity to share our ideas openly.
The technology and most importantly the internet use have given us all the power to gather the information about anything just by clicking. After listening to him, I feel like the member of the most empowered generations of all. Like we the people of 21st century are having powers in the form of technology and we can bring the changes worldwide by these magical powers.
What do you say about it? Do you feel like you have powers to bring a change? As for example, a single petition you sign can bring a change worldwide?
The three of the articles all give the idea of what Digital Activism is and how this power of the internet is ruling the world now a days. The article: “The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism”, have given us the idea of what people have in their hands and how well they are using the technology. The author named Zuckerman stated in the article that “Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.” If a tool passes “cute cat” purposes, and is widely used for low-value purposes, it can be and likely is used for online activism, too.” And I totally agree with the author here, if people use the internet for their pleasures then there is need to understand that what this technology is capable to do and what do you have in your hand and you are not utilizing it in a proper manner.
What are your opinions on it?
The second article: “The Digital Cultural Shift: From Scale to Power”, the author stated that digital strategies and platforms provide a voice to the innocents when mainstream media ignores the issue at all. We have seen many of the leaders who use the social media in order to run their campaigns, they use digital platforms to catalyze actions. The last article: “10 twitter Hashtag that changed the way we talk about social issues”, listen down the hashtags list which really bring the change to the world.
After reading all of this information, I felt like what we have in the form of technology is like a blessing, if and only if this blessing is being used for right and just purposes. This Digital Activism not only bring the social justice but is a source to bring forward the voice of the innocents who struggle hard in order to get justice and still gets nothing.
The article I am sharing for this week’s news post is about environmental activism goes digital in lockdown.
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-environmental-digital-lockdownbut-movement-good.html
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 
I agree that this technology is a blessing if it is used correctly. However, many would argue that there is no right way of using the internet, but I believe we should all aim to creating a better environment by putting our voices together as a collective and not use social media for our disadvantage such as searching for memes and getting caught up on the Internet celebrities drama and be vocal about the problems that are affecting our present which in turn will become our future if we continue to ignore by feeding into the distractions of social media.
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