slacktivism
Silent Activism
Do you take part in online activism to make a difference, or does it just show your indifference?
Avinash Subramaniam Avinash Subramaniam 24 Feb, 2010
Do you take part in online activism to make a difference, or does it just show your indifference?
Do you take part in online activism to make a difference, or does it just show your indifference?
Do you take part in online activism to make a difference, or does it just show your indifference?
Another V-Day has come and gone and one can’t help but recall the ‘flavour of last year sometime this month’, famously known as the ‘Pink Chaddi’ campaign. Fans of the aforementioned form of protest, though, won’t take kindly to what this sort of ‘demonstrating’ has come to be known as: Slacktivism.
On the other hand, there are many who feel the S-word is well-earned and a perfect descriptor for activism of the Pink Chaddi kind. They believe it has zero political relevance and only gives those who participate in such initiatives an illusion of making a difference without doing anything beyond signing up for a Facebook group.
For the time-strapped and sensitive people who want to show they care, it’s often an easy choice between joining a fan page and instantly feeling good about oneself or hauling oneself for sit-ins, risking arrest and maybe even a spot of police brutality. Whether the former translates into anything more substantial than passing fancy is beside the ‘slacktivist’ point.
Then again, it’s possible to dismiss glib criticism of ‘slacktivism’ as a case of needless negativity. After all, having thousands of previously ‘apathetic’ people unexpectedly indulging in a kind of rapid-fire ‘activism’ can prove useful in spreading awareness about causes that benefit from this kind of attention. But it does also raise a few tricky questions.
Questions like, are the publicity gains from new media worth the organisational losses traditional activism (are likely to) suffer on account of people preferring the online way to lessen the burden of guilt on their inertia-ridden souls over the more trying and ‘boring’ conventional forms of activism? Does the convenience of ‘click now and feel good’ push those who may have earlier confronted the problem in person to thoughtlessly embrace the web’s ‘cause celebre’ of the season, but little else?
Human tendency is such that a significant percentage of ‘reluctant’ activists in our midst are content to take the undemanding way out, by going online. You wouldn’t think twice about joining a Facebook page devoted to gay rights called, say, ‘Give us a hand’. But would you (heterosexual or otherwise) devote a couple of hours of your precious time to walk the road hand-in-hand with a fellow-protestor (heterosexual or otherwise)? No, really.
That’s the power, and danger, of ‘slacktivism’.
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