Limitation of Social-Media-Based Activism
Social networks seem to have revolutionized social activism. People no long need to shout out for supports, but a single inflammatory post on social media can easily help people with the same opinion and idea gather together online.
However, an article published on The New Yorker provides some new perspective. Its author, Gladwell, claimed that the functionality of social media in activism is not as great as we thought, because it only works for low-risk activisms. On one side, social media do provide a platform that makes proposals easier to be carried out, and do motivate people to join in by showing them it’s what others are doing. But on the other side it’s not enough for high-risk activism such as civil rights movement, which requires trust, commitment and organization. He argued that, though people usually credited the success of several recent political events such as the protest in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to involvement of social media, there wasn’t much social media involvement going on inside the countries.
What he said does make sense, in that online connections, which are usually weak, are different from real-life connections, which can be very strong. This leads to the question of strength of weak ties.
Social media are a lot about weak ties, where people have great opportunities to meet new people and establish new weak ties. It’s what differentiates social media from real-life social networks. The strength of weak ties is clear: people retrieve vast amount of novel information on social media from those weak ties. It’s the same for social-media-based activism. People outreach new crowds and communities through the weak ties, so that the influence of a certain activism can expand.
Social media does work well for activism of charity purposes. For example, Ice Bucket Challenge, influence of which grows exponentially in these days, and ALS receives a huge amount of donation in a short time. These kinds of activism are of low risk, as your engagement won’t hurt your life and financial status, and thus people are willing to take action.
However, it’s different when it comes to high-risk activism. Low degree of acceptance, trust and commitment due to unacquaintance undermine the power of weak ties. The loose connections mean that participants can quit whenever they don’t want to take risk. As the activism is loosely structured, it hardly can succeed due to lack of organization and plan.
The limitation of weak ties on activism also has more general inference of functionality of weak ties in social media world. People receive vast information and viewpoints from weak ties, but it doesn’t necessarily mean people will take them seriously or accept them easily. As people who have the same interests usually group together, a novel viewpoint from outside group can be easily overwhelmed by the majority of group members’. Social media even intensify the trend by allowing people to filter information by themselves. Thus, weak ties work great at sharing information, but not great at sharing viewpoints and reaching agreement.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-3?