Aditya Banerjee's Library tagged activism → View Popular, Search in Google

Sep

2011

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker

All the tools do is to make the weak ties more accessible, but that's not going to lead to too many revolutions outside of slacktivism & clicktivism. Unless of course, the internet is turned off. That would be the real stimulus to get people off the armchair.
Time to revisit the high context & low context culture definitions too

www.newyorker.com/...101004fa_fact_gladwell

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activism socialmedia facebook gladwell

Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?
In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.
8 more annotation(s)...
- “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
- Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
- The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life
- By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf.
- In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.
- No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
- Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail.
- A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.

Sheeple - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Are we people or "sheeple"?

en.wikipedia.org/Sheeple

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activism culture wikipedia language people

Slacktivism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And so we have a proper definition & wikipedia page for it

en.wikipedia.org/Slacktivism

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activism socialmedia culture language wikipedia

posits that people who support a cause by performing simple measures are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change
the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair

Mar

2010

Social-Media Sites Become War Front for Nestlé - WSJ.com

Another case of the viral web & online protests

online.wsj.com/...4434404575149883850508158.html

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activism facebook socialmedia environment brands nestle

Feb

2010

Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships | Video on TED.com

Interesting way to look at things
via http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_the_internet_can_impede_democracy.php

www.ted.com/...ternet_what_orwell_feared.html

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internet politics ted video activism democracy socialmedia

Oct

2009

Takedown Hall Of Shame | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF's Hall Of Shame collects the worst of the worst.

www.eff.org/takedowns

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