Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

For a long time, one of the critiques leveled at Millenials was that we were “armchair activists” and that social media not only enabled that form of activism, but insidiously made millennials feel as if they were doing something, with the echo-chamber of online platforms leading many to believe that their message was getting out. The #Ferguson highlights several reasons this critique was unfair:

1.     “Twitter allows users who are territorially displaced to feel like they are united across both space and time.” Social media has enabled coordinated marches, protests, etc. across locations – we saw this most recently in the Women’s March and will see it again this Saturday with the March for Science. Still, the authors characterization of “territorially displaced” I think could be picked apart more. Yes, #Ferguson was a trending hashtag, and the broader Ferguson community was the seat of much of the protests in 2014, yet what was being protested was not just #Ferguson but the system it represented. I have a lot of questions here re: the importance of place for a social movement. Did people feel left out if not in Ferguson, DC, etc.?

2.     I think “armchair activism” is more powerful now, simply because social media is so much more prominent and also because the boundary between “social media” and “media” continues to decay. Literally every Trump tweet is a news story, and trending hashtags on Twitter and other platforms are now worthy of broader coverage. This isn’t to say they are effective as actual boots on the ground, but social media has made virtual voices heard in a way that speaking in private never could.

The authors write that what we need is “internet related ethnography,” and I agree. The other day I heard an interview with April Ryan, the White House Correspondent for the Urban Radio Network. She discussed the dynamics of White House press briefings and how Sean Spicer often refuses to answer questions. One of the more powerful tools to force him to answer questions, however, is that Twitter is ablaze as he speaks, and reporters can immediately read off tweets and trends in their questions to him – he gets both immediate response and pushback, and that can force him to answer more clearly.

As the Social Media book has pointed out, we need to think beyond online and offline as separate realms, recognizing that a phone is a tool as much as it is a connection to some “offline” world separate from the one we inhabit daily.