Online communities build off social movements,
enabling the connection of persons worldwide to develop a base and gain
awareness of issues. Online social movements gained momentum in the
late 20th century and early 21st century as new generations sought social change. With access to the internet and the fast-growing World Wide Web,
online social movements brought awareness to issues both political and
social. Online social movements have been praised and criticized; the
former for its ability to raise awareness to important causes, and the
latter for its ability to perpetuate problems like slacktivism. Although online activism has received criticism, it has had real impacts on social movements.
The impact of online movements
The
impact of online movements has been substantial since the introduction
of the internet. With the ever-growing medium of social media, internet
activism has reached the forefront of the internet. Through the use of
social networking sites such as Facebook and content-sharing sites as YouTube, the opportunity for wide-scale, online social participation has increased.
Beneficial impacts
Several social media movements have raised money for causes, such as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raising $100million
in 30 days. Even if they do not directly involve monetary funding, many
online social movements raise awareness for causes such as
institutionalized racism against African Americans with the Black Lives Matter movement and the inappropriate use of force by police authorities against black females, such as with the Say Her Name
social movement. In the political sphere, active online groups increase
political participation by providing a framework for discussion,
leading petitions, and collecting donations in order to further a
political agenda.
Social media can break pluralistic ignorance,
which is the belief that your opinions are not shared by others, when
in reality, they tend to be. By revealing commonalities, online
platforms enable the synchronisation of opinions across disparate
geographies by creating a sense of physical presence and connection
among those with similar perspectives.
Detrimental impacts
Some
experts believe there are potential weaknesses and long-term
repercussions that can be identified with online movements. Some
examples are clicktivism and slacktivism, where the use of social media to promote a cause include activities such as:
- Organizing protests
- Facilitating boycotts
- Online parody and satire
Examples of online movements
Social movements advance their work through the media. It is easier,
less costly as well as time-consuming to link collective behavior as
real-time communication can occur vastly and simultaneously via social
media. Some examples of online movements include:
- 2009 Iranian presidential election protests
- Egyptian revolution of 2011
- Iranian protest
- England Riots
- Invisible Children
- 2014 Venezuelan protests
- The Zeitgeist Movement
- #BlackLivesMatter
- Say Her Name
- #JeSuisCharlie
- Worldwide Refugee Crisis, Refugees Welcome
- #LoveWins
- ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
- Occupy Wall Street
- March for Science
- Me Too (hashtag)
- Popolo Viola (Purple People)
- Fair Copyright for Canada (FCFC)
The future
The
future of online movements is hard to predict. However, there are some
clear directions where they could certainly lead towards. Vanessa DiMauro
believes the biggest trend concerning online communities in the near
future is private online communities. While these large networks that we
encounter and use on a day-to-day basis have provided us with a
productive and collaborative experience they have also increased to
unmanageable sizes. To become a learning environment these groups need
to be much smaller and manageable. This is where the idea and trend of
private online communities could potentially be the future of online
communities.
Online Social Movements and Commercial Social Media Platforms
Since
the late 2000s, increased use of commercial social media platforms by
social movements has been reported. According to Lopes, "Social Media
websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the various online
blogs have arguably given a voice to individuals that otherwise would
not be heard." However, the adoption of these commercial platforms has concerned
analysts as they highlighted asymmetrical relationships between the
for-profit aims of social media and the copy-left values that drive many
online movements. According to Fenton, "Claims for the extension and
re-invention of activism need to be considered in the context of the
material social and political world of inequality, injustice and
corporate dominance." For example, "in his analysis of the Purple Movement (Popolo Viola) in Italy and its extensive use of Facebook, Coretti (2014)
demonstrates that, while the myth of the network as open and inclusive
persists, it acts as a disguise for the communication protocols of
commercial social networking platforms that may well enable large-scale
mobilization but ultimately, through their very functionality, encourage
organizational centralization and fragmentation in social movements"
(Fenton, 2016, p.184).
The proprietary nature of the design of platforms such as Facebook
pages fails to provide movements with the necessary instruments in terms
of a shared democratic management of their resources. Moreover, the
inability to manage Facebook pages and groups according to commonly
agreed values promotes vertical power structures within movements,
contributing to controversial management of Facebook pages and to
internal divisions that significantly hinder the potential of protest.
Important figures
- Shaun King; a Twitter-based civil rights activist.
- DeRay McKesson; Twitter- and Instagram-based civil rights activist, known for his involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Colin Kaepernick; American football quarterback known for his involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement and causing controversy for kneeling rather than standing for the national anthem, a symbolic act in protest of the unjust and oppressive treatment of people of color in the United States.
- Rachel Dolezal; civil rights activist that caused controversy after her Caucasian parents disclosed that she was a Caucasian woman passing as black. Received backlash on various social media platforms for claiming she was a victim of hate crimes as an African American woman.
- Van Jones; civil rights activist and creator of various initiatives such as #YesWeCode, which is meant to give aid to minorities in technology fields.
