“Australian youth’s main focus’ on activism are generally to do with environmental causes, animal rights, anti capitalist protests, anti racial demonstrations and anti war marches. Young people are attracted to the hope and promise of building a new future” (2005).
Due to our politics, it is hard for us youth to get involved in such protests. Our age is the one factors that disables us from being taken seriously. To overcome this, we protest through social media. We use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to get our message across and to spread word. My only concern with this is that do young people actually really care? Has the ease of hash tagging, sharing and “liking” made charity disposable? Living in an individualist society (2014), it makes me wonder whether people actually commit to such protests. For example, Kony 2012, remember that? Remember the buzz? I will give credit to social media on its ability to bring awareness and attention to a political situation but how many people in Australia got involved physically? I recall seeing one Kony sticker around a whole 3 suburbs. I’m not singling out every young person in Australia as I know there are many that do get involved and I know many that regularly attend protests about Refugee’s.
The term coined for social media activism is “clicktivism” although some like to call it “slacktivism”.”When the small act of token support is very public in nature, people can kind of signal to others that they have already helped the cause they actually arent more likey to help later ” says Kate White from the University of British Columbia (2013). What does social media do for protests other than raise awareness? If you want to make a difference, get involved, commit to the cause, donate. By just liking or sharing something isn’t going to contribute physically in making anything better.
Sources:
Sherrod, L 2005, Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia, Greenwood Publishing Group
Khorana, S 2014, We Are The 99%, Lecture, University of Wollongong
White, K 2013, Clicktivism: Why social media is not good for charity, SBS, viewed 9th May 2014, http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/11/18/clicktivism-why-social-media-not-good-charity
Oh Madeline 