Is "on-Line Activism" Insidious?

[AB Editor]

Is "on-line activism" insidious?

Unicef seem to think so:



I rarely see it myself, but I have in the past seen things like "click like to cure cancer" or similar.

Do you think that kind of "activism" lets people off really engaging with the issue?

I picked the story up from here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/3/4296194/unicef-facebook-activism-ad-campaign-likes-dont-save-lives

[Baldric]

'An error occured, please try again later.'

[ChuckFickens]

A lot of the facebook posts you see shared that say things like "like this page if you want a cure for cancer" are money making schemes, a page with 10'000 likes can be sold for a couple of hundred quid, then once it's sold the subject of the page suddenly changes.

[ChuckFickens]

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/facebook-spam-scam-secret-revealed.html

[AB Editor]

Didn't realise that Chuck.

I think it's about the people clicking "like" rather than those running the page though?

[AB Editor]

as in, what is the "liker" expecting to get - and what are they "let off" from by clicking the like button?

[jno]

I've signed up to 38degrees, who stir up a lot of interest and send out petitions, some of them successfully (I think their first one was stopping the sale of woodland.). I only sign the ones I want to, I am not an all-purpose activist.

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/

[rockyracoon]

I never click 'like' on these things, my newsfeed can get clogged up with friends liking every fricking aspect of life, if they spent as much energy 'doing' instead of 'liking' we might get somewhere. The bits that really twists my melons are the words, 'some of you won't share/like but my friends will, you know who you are', that guarantees a non compliance from me.

[rockyracoon]

When I signed the petition for the bees I joined up with them jno, that's about as 'active' as I'll get.

[woofgang]

what rocky said..

[wildwood]

Have just posted Chuck's link on facebook. Let's start the ball rolling and get rid of these 'conscious' likes.

[jim360]

Online activism can also be insidious because it can be relatively easy to sign up to a cause without really understanding what it was you were signing up to. I suppose this can happen on the street as well -- but there are several petitions I've signed when perhaps I ought to have done more reading. Some of these petitions have led to actual changes, or real pressure being applied, and who knows if I was right to support that cause or not? Most of the time I hope I've been careful to have some idea of what it is I am supporting, but not always.

[LazyGun]

Have not really thought how it might impact upon charity, but I can imagine that someone "liking" a subject on social media or signing up for an online poll might possibly sit back and think they have now done their bit.

And it is that lack of engagement that means that an electronic poll needs to have a really sizeable number of signatories for it to even begin to be taken seriously by politicians, whose inclination might be to just dismiss the sentiments out of hand...

But while these might be considered the downside of a more transparent, connected online world, such e-activism also has a positive bonus of introducing causes and issues to a much greater audience and has the potential of generating greater real world activism. The "Arab Spring" protests, especially in Egypt attest to that.

You might even consider the co-ordination of people involved in the Summer of 2012 UK riots a negative aspect of online activism, since many of those co-ordinated their efforts via online activity....