Digital Activism or Clicktivism?

With social media playing a more important role in our lives, digital activism is becoming a lot more common. It is made possible by the public sphere which Habermas describes as ‘the coming together of peoples and the discussion of ideas...often related to governance and democratic ideals... They have the potential to affect public opinion and public policy’. The facebook group members or the people directed to an online petition through a friend’s tweet all have this potential to affect public opinion and policy.

Just how effective – if at all - is digital activism? Some people criticise the current generation of ‘clicktivists’ who have made protesting all about convenience. The term ‘clicktivism’ simply describes how easy and effortless it has become for people to sign online petitions or join protest groups on facebook, yet there is nothing in the whole process that actually encourages them to do something about what we believe. Instead, many of us simply stop at liking a group or retweeting a statement believing that our job is done, meaning that there’s a lack of offline action taking place.

Although social media has helped change the way in which campaigning, making people aware of causes and organising protests are done - making the whole process a lot easier and accessible to large numbers of people - the consequence is a lack of engagement. However it is inaccurate to say that clicktivism leads to no offline action as you only have to look at the role social media played in the Eygptian protests and London student protests for proof that this isn’t the case.

I do however believe that such cases where social media actually leads to huge offline action are somewhat rare and special cases. The lack of engagement that results of clicktivism really does make it easy to forget that the intended or desired response is some offline action. For example, I wonder what percentage of the people who changed their profile pictures to a TV character from their childhood to raise awareness of the NSPCC (regardless of whether the NSPCC actually planned the campaign or not) then went on to donate to the charity.

This isn’t a problem that only campaigners face – businesses do too. Just because a brand has a Facebook page or Twitter account, it doesn’t guarantee an increase in sales of their products. Social media is only effective when used correctly.