Social media is filled with armchair activists these days. Gosh, I’d rather refer to them as ‘Badi badi baate, vada pao khate’. Witnessing alot of cases of online activism these days, I’m unable to get the point of it. So, basically what you do is that you sit on your phone/laptop and write paras on some issue, but, does it actually matter? I’ve seen people ranting about stuff happening around the world on social media, but when it comes to actually support it, they’re the first ones to back down. This term is known as slacktivism which basically means “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little physical or practical effect, other than to make the person doing it feel satisfied that they have contributed. I’ll be referring to the top three reasons TO NOT DO SLACKTIVISM:
1• Nobody cares: C’mon, you seriously think anyone cares? What you think about some incident that happened in some country, and ranting about it on social media won’t make a difference. Most people are engaged in these worthless debates on social media, which are nothing more than virtual mediums to waste time and energy. The rate of these rantings creating a change is lower than KRK’s IQ. People read the drama, like it and then forget about it. What purpose does it serves except creating nuisance and unecessory drama? NOTHING. Slacktivism does nothing more than feeding the ego of slacktivists into believing that they’re somehow doing some form of activism, which is completely false.
2• Take action, not Facebook reaction: So you wrote about some stuff on Facebook that has been happening lately and is controversial, great. You got 100 likes? Awesome. You got 25 shares? Amazing, but did it manage to create a single ripple of change in a person’s mind, who saw it? Probably not. So what you need to do is to actually do something that has the worth of being called ‘activism’. Activism demands action, a type of action that creates a change, a change that is effective and productive. TBH, I don’t understand as to how can a like on a hungry African kid’s picture will feed him/her, when you crib on donating even a single rupee.
3• The ugly side of widespread slacktivism: The thing is that slacktivism has an underlined potential attached to it which makes you believe that any problem can be countered using social media. When talking about big problems all over the world, slacktivism turns out to be a big failure. Various studies have been conducted on this issue and it has been found that slacktivism is the easiest way for a person to participate in a issue. It was found that on observing no positive change by this participation, many of the slacktivists lost all hope that any change can be brought about.
Another factor is that slacktivism is also used for doing various illegal activities. For eg. A film was made on the plight of African kids and people were asked to send money to help the unfortunate children. What happened was that the money was asked to be given to the filmmakers and not the African organisations. The money collected was later spent on making the second part of the movie. The people had seen the request and blindly obliged to it, helping the filmakers to cash in millions of dollars. It’s one of the prime examples describing the uglier side of slacktivism, where people blindly do things without thinking twice. Here’s the link to the case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012
We spend a lot of time on social media these days, doing things of minimal importance. Anyone can turn into an armchair activist, but doing real activism is something that actually matters.
Peace out like always.