This week we really took a look at how social activism really has taken a turn for the better with the digital age, whether it be racial injustice, gay rights, or anything else that needed to be brought to our attention. With the recent events that have unfolded with the riots and protests, they are brought to you on a platter via twitter where your only option is to look and listen. Everyones feed’s were stuffed with the events that were transpiring and it seemed like for the first time ever the eyes of the nation were truly on the cause. I think this is one of the good features of all of this technology that he’s made it into our every day lives. Back in the 60’s when some of the first protests were happening, they did not have these means of getting all of their information out in a manner like this. Sure there were a lot of news paper articles, or some coverage of it on the nightly news, but the people who wanted to act like nothing was happening, could just switch of their TV’s and go on with their everyday lives.

One of the articles we read was “These 10 Twitter hashtags changed the way we talk about social issues”. Now this article was written in 2016, so some of the hashtags aren’t as relevant to today such as #IndyRef which I never even heard of, probably because I wasn’t using twitter at that point. But thing such as that are not even close to trending now, where as the hashtag black lives matter, on the other hand would be easily the number one trending hashtag on that list if they relate it today. The number on from this list isn’t far though, which was the incident in Ferguson, which made it up to number one trending on this list.

Another piece we covered this week was the ted talk “Online Social Change: Easy to Organize, hard to win”. This was a very interesting ted talk, which brings up the censorship of media outlets, specifically in other parts of the world. She talks about how great it is that there are outlets like twitter, and instagram, and Facebook, which help get awareness of what is happening to people. Without these technologies a lot of people wouldn’t even be aware of what is going on, but there is a silver lining. She states that with all of these people being aware of what is happening these days, whether it is protests or injustice, why isn’t there more success with these movements? Her theory is that just because it is easier for people to become aware of these problems, does not mean there is a easy and good outcome waiting to be had. I personally think that she is kind of wrong because it would be foolish to not work smarter and work harder. This was done in 2014, so nobody could have seen what was coming, but it has been a huge success with twitter and people raising awareness for the social injustice.

My question to you is, do you think that social media is helping or hurting us when it comes to activism?

Check out this news article about the election:https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/09/us/trump-vs-biden