Outside of university, I volunteer with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC). Currently, we are halfway through a nation wide fundraising campaign, which naturally leads to campaigning on social media. As a grass roots organisation, AYCC relies on volunteers to run their campaigns, meaning the nature of the campaign is unlike a professionally run campaign. All of the ideas come from monthly meetings, where we brainstorm and these ideas get sent to the co-ordinators who pick the best, feasible options to turn into reality.
And being a fundraiser, we also have to do our own publicity to get our friends and family to donate, which has got me think about the phenomenon now widely known as slacktivism.
Slacktvism can be defined as:
actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement
Many argue for the positives outcomes of actions that could come under the umbrella of slacktivism. For example, after taking over your Facebook newsfeed for a week or so, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was able to raise $115 million US for the ALS association back in 2014, as well as awareness for a condition that was mostly unheard of. But many also argue that it has its draw backs. See hashtags such as “Bring Back Our Girls” for example. Good causes the people who supported them may very well have cared about strongly, but ultimately saw very little action or change.
Social media has drastically changed the world of activism. Spreading the word about a cause has become far easier, however many claim that people have become to quick to congratulate themselves for improving the world without really achieving anything.
This debate has attracted so much attention that academics such Yu-Hao Lee and Gary Hsieh from Michigan State University have published papers on the subject. In their paper, Does Slacktivism Hurt Activism?: The Effects of Moral Balancing and Consistency in Online Activism, Lee and Hsieh found that
no evidence that performing one form of slacktivism (i.e., signing online petitions) will undermine a subsequent civic activity (i.e., donating to a charity)… When compared to the control condition, participants who signed petition were more likely to donate to a charity when the charity was related to the petition’s cause (63% of those who signed donated compared to 46% who donated in the control condition).
This study suggests that while the slacktivist action itself may not create meaningful change on its own, it may be part of a larger, meaningful movement and encourage those reached by such actions to go out and doing more for the cause.
Despite studies such as these suggesting that these new social media tools improve the ability of organisation to reach an audience for their cause, the activism vs slacktivism debate doesn’t appear to being going anyway any time soon.