Cloudy with a chance of #BlackLivesMatter
The introduction of social media has been a significant enabler for individuals to participate in protest and activism online.
Social media, unlike traditional forms such as screen and print media, affords a voice and an audience to the everyday citizen. For the online individual, social media is an easily accessible, inexpensive and powerful tool for challenging the norms of mainstream and popular culture (Lievrouw 2011, p. 2).
A key benefit of social media is the way in which it bridges geographical and cultural borders. In the online space geography is no longer a barrier, with people able to connect with one another from anywhere in the world providing they have an internet connection (Newsmaker Group n.d).
This new level of connection has unlocked countless possibilities for using social media platforms for protest and activism, including a heightened awareness of the disasters, injustices and corruption taking place throughout the world. Online individuals have found the confidence through social media to speak out against these events, participating in and forming online movements to share information with others, resist authority, and question dominant and long held views.
In 2013 the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was born, following the shooting death of black teen Treyvon Martin in Florida. The movement, using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media, grew rapidly following the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City (Bonilla & Rose 2015). In the years since, powered by social media, the focus of the BLM movement has expanded from police to violence to situating itself as “an ideological and political intervention” (Bonilla & Rose 2015) striving to end the racial vilification of blacks worldwide.
There has been significant criticism of what has come to be known as ‘clicktivism’, amidst claims that much of online activism is merely a passive awareness rather than an active, online movement. For some, digital modes of activism represent “fleeting moments of awareness, quickly replaced by the customary innocuousness of social media pleasantries” (Bonilla & Rose 2015).
Opponents to this viewpoint believe that clicktivism, while present, can and does lead to passive, online individuals transforming themselves into active, real world activists. 25-year-old student Johnetta Elzie believes her role as a protester today has occurred as a direct result of her awareness of #BlackLivesMatter. “We saw it with Trayvon Martin. We saw it with Jordan Davis – but I always felt away from everything. Then I saw Brown’s body laying out there, and I said, ‘Damn, they did it again!’ But now that it happened in my home, I’m not just going to tweet about it from the comfort of my bed. So I went down there. You could still see the bloodstains deeply and darkly in the streets after they moved his body.”
Source: Libertarian Republic 2015
Bonilla, Y & Rose, J 2015, ‘#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States’, American Ethnologist, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 4-17.
Hsieh, S & Rakia, R 2014, ‘After #Ferguson’, The Nation, 27 October, viewed 2 January 2018, <www.thenation.com/article/after-ferguson/>.
Facebook 2018, ‘Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life’ [image], Create and account, Facebook, viewed 2 January 2018, <www.facebook.com>.
Klein, A 2013, ‘Grassroots group actually front for shady figures’ [image], Trayvon Martin Protest Leaders Revealed, WND, viewed 2 January 2018, <http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/trayvon-martin-protest-leaders-revealed>/.
Libertarian Republic 2015, ‘Clinton Shouted Down By Black Lives Matter Protesters’ [image], Clinton Shouted Down By Black Lives Matter Protesters, Libertarian Republic, viewed 2 January 2018, <https://thelibertarianrepublic.com/clinton-shouted-down-by-black-lives-matter-protesters/>.
Lievrouw, L 2011, Alternative & Activist New Media, Polity, Cambridge, U.K, P. 2.
Newsmaker Group n.d, Social media has no geographical barriers, Newsmaker Group, viewed 2 January 2018, <www.newsmakergroup.com/social-media-has-no-geographical-barriers/>.
