More handpicked essays just for you.
The role of social media for social movement
Social media and the impact of social movements
Role of social media in social protest harvard
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Social movements come and go; they represent all manner of political aspirations, and aim to achieve their political objectives by influencing a particular target group’s opinion. Some groups reach out directly to just a few key decision makers or constituencies, while others act more indirectly by broadcasting their message to as wide an audience as possible. Popular forms of social media have played a significant influence in social movements throughout the last few years. Two prominent examples are Ai Weiwei’s use of the social platform: Twitter, and the use of Yik Yak at the University of Missouri. Social movements rely on the media for the mobilization of political support, validation in the mainstreams discourse, and opportunity to broaden …show more content…
the scope of conflicts. Social media coverage is crucial for social movements and their ability to secure public legitimacy. Checking Facebook, Twitter, or other forms of social media have become part of many people’s daily, if not hourly, routine. Social media offers its users various ways to react to entertainment and political content and interact with each other. Classically, social movements face deficiencies in funding, manpower, or knowledge about complex issues. So fortunately, social media addresses these issues in relatively effortless ways. Users can transcend geographical borders and easily spread ideas and information. Take for instance, Ai Weiwei’s political activism through his Twitter feed.
The provocative messages in his feed support his campaign for a free and civilized Chinese society. In China, Weiwei has spent time in jail, and was not allowed by the government to leave Beijing for a year. He now cannot travel without official permission; however, Weiwei is able to use the Internet to a certain degree to circumvent authorities. As a result, he has become a symbol of the struggle for human rights in China. He uses any medium – sculpture, ready-mades, photography, performance, architecture, blogs, and especially tweets – to deliver his message. He utilizes the Internet to open up the doors to his audiences. Weiwei tweets messages in regards to the brutal treatment enforced by Chinese officers. His tweets prompt his following activists to engage in this revolutionary dialogue. These followers pledge their allegiance to the cultural movement via Twitter. Such massive feedback turned into a social media flood, causing the controversy over Chinese law officials to become viral. In this context, entertainment can serve as a unifying force to pull together social media users around a particular issue or ideal. Moreover, the identity work involved in social media activity can incentivize associations with positive political causes.
In Weiwei’s example, the audience can observe that social psychological needs are met. When the followers pledged their allegiance, they engaged in identity management,
…show more content…
and in turn once they engaged, the followers internalized and reproduced the messages of Ai Weiwei. The followers were allowing their social networks visual access to their knowledge base of social issues. Social needs were being met because, by their nature, social networking sites encourage diffusion throughout one’s network. In a similar manner, the Cultural Revolution at the University of Missouri was launched by a social media blitz through the anonymous social media platform: Yik Yak.
Anonymity can bring out the worst in people – people may become bullies, openly racist or sexist, or may even threaten or provoke others. The latest example of this behavior comes from student protests at this campus where racial tension recently led to the resignation of Mizzou’s university president. As evidence for racism in the campus community, the student body president had screenshots from this anonymous social platform. Launched in 2013, Yik Yak spread quickly enough to become a core mode of interaction among students in many universities and colleges because of its features of anonymity and transience of identity. As a social network, it is the perfect platform to provide a glimpse into the culture of a local community where people are free to not hold back any discrepancies. As is often with the case of anonymity, sometimes what people see is bullying, hate speech, and threats; however, the content like the hate speech and threats from Missouri are actually largely the exception for Yik Yak culture. Yik Yak feed usually contains typical sexual jokes and complaints about classes and weather, along with strains with positive messages of
support. Yik Yak does have inevitable misbehavior, however, it is not as bad as it can be. One reason for this is that the design of the system encourages formation of social norms by letting users see what material is up-voted and down-voted. If there is content that a lot of viewers do not favor, then that content will not be there for very long once only five users down-vote the content. So just like someone learns norms about where it is unacceptable to light up a cigarette by the dirty looks he or she receive, Yik Yak users learn that racism is unacceptable in their community because of the down votes they get, and along with the backlash of the viewers. In this way, the users of Yik Yak are the ones with the most power to regulate the behavior in their communities. The stance of many social networking sites has been to leave users to their own devices with content that is terrible or not. Yik Yak seems to be doing its best to encourage users to not be terrible. If social norms are doing a decent job of regulation behavior on Yik Yak, then it really is up to the individual communities to think about the kind of community that they want to be. A high degree of public trust in the media; social movements that are long lived and effectively institutionalized within society, tend not to challenge the status quo directly, and so consequently are less dependent on media coverage for their survival. However, media coverage may be crucial for other, less well known social movements whose often transitional and adversarial nature tends to weaken their ability to secure public legitimacy. To an extent, good or bad social media coverage can help to make or break a social movement by either validating or invalidating the information.
Art Review Magazine recently named Ai Weiwei “the most powerful artist in the world”, primarily because (Like Warhol) his reach extends further then the art world. Born in 1957 in Beijing, China, Weiwei is the son of the famous Chinese poet Ai Qing. Weiwei was introduced to the price of dissidents at an early age when his farther was denounced during the Anti-Rightist movement and sent (with the rest of his family) to a labour camp for the remaining duration of the Cultural Revolution.
Ai Weiwei was born during the Cultural Revolution in China of 1950s, he inherited a lot of his political knowledge from his father who was a poet called Ai Quig. Ai Quig was then later exiled with his family to re-education camps on the out reaches of a desert in 1958 for questioning government authority. After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese citizens were allowed to travel outside their borders again in 1970s. As a young man, the place that Ai Weiwei dreamed about going to was New York. He went to New York and was exposed to its western influences, its liberty and freedom of expression (Springford, 2011).Using photography Weiwei recorded and documented everything that inspired him. Weiwei visited galleries and art museums that exposed him to the world of conceptual art, becoming influenced by Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. Ai Weiwei admired the ways of artists who could simply proclaim what was art and what wasn’t art, how Duchamp questioned art and when something gets to be art (Springford, 2011).Ai Weiwei came back to China in 1993 to take care of his sick father, and found himself drawn to his responsibility as an artist, to take the task of re-awakening his country through his art and to expose his thoughts on the corrupt and controlling nature of China’s government (Philipson,2012). Ai Weiwei has always been an outspoken artist. In the course of his art making, Weiwei has used a form of activism in his art, with political ideologies that exist because of the Chinese government. He also uses a sense of memory and the countrys past and history. Most of his art involves the public and their outlook of the government. Weiwei requests engagement from the public as a show of protest in his artworks (Harris & Zucker, 2009). When...
“I don’t want to be part of this kind of denying reality. We live in this time. We have to speak out” (Klayman). Ai Weiwei is an internationally known Chinese artist as well as activist, and his motivation and determination can be summed up by this quote. In all of his pieces, Weiwei critically examines the social and administrative issues facing China today. Many of his works exhibit multiple themes that can be interpreted in various different ways. This lends itself to the universal appeal of his art and makes it a more effective medium of conveying his messages to viewers. Ai Weiwei’s activist artwork—and activist artwork in general—is important to society because it effectively forces the viewer to engage in a self-reflective process that makes the viewer critically examine his or her own beliefs and world. Nevertheless, censorship greatly hinders the dissemination of the critical and thought provoking messages of Ai Weiwei’s art and makes his artwork less effective. In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship of Ai Weiwei’s activist art and the Communist Party’s subsequent censorship, I will examine Ai Weiwei’s influential childhood, his specific brand of activist artwork, the censorship of the Chinese government and the effects of censorship on the effectiveness of Ai Weiwei’s art.
Yik Yak is probably the biggest social trend I’ve experienced while at West Point. It is relatively new and the anonymous interface gives people next level comfort especially in an environment where there are several restrictions on what you can say out loud. Yik Yak is useful, I would argue – here more so than at other colleges – CGR can send out quick updates and a significant amount of the cadet population would see them right away; questions about formation times, gym hours and several other things can be answered with ease. However, due to the anonymity, Yik Yak has also become a platform for anonymous hate and bashing. This isn’t new and everyone knows it’s happening. We had a PMEE session talking about why people should
Thomas Billitteri said in his article “Many anti-cyberbullying laws have been passed around the country” (Billitteri). The one way to make cyberbullying worse is to let the abusers be anonymous and have no consequence. Yik Yak is an app that allows users to project any demeaning comment about somebody to the public. According to Mary Pappenfuss in the article “Virginia Campus Uproar over 'cyberbullying ' Yik Yak App after Sex Harassment, Murder," activists were attacked over 700 times on the app and reported it to the campus authorities. The campus started with a school-wide email, and eventually had to ban the app from their servers (Pappenfuss). This shows just how serious the subject is. The first action the school took was to send a school-wide email about the problem at hand in an effort to stop, but they soon realized they would have to do much more. Virginia College had to ban this social media app from all of their servers as a last ditch effort to stop it. Unfortunately, this college was not the only ones forced to ban the app as colleges around the nation have banned Yik Yak from their servers due to the amount of reports of sex assualt and
The news media and social media affect and influence the political world. The political arena can now be easily accessed through every citizen’s smartphone screens and tablet screens. For instance, Barack Obama became the country’s most Instagrammer-in-Chief (Carr). Obama utilized social media to promote his climate agenda while on his trip to Alaska. He would snap pictures of the landscape and share the pictures on his social media accounts which earned him more than thousands of likes. The media and its political connections play a huge scene in this topic of influence. Since the election of 2008, Obama utilized Facebook to connect with the public (Carr). This year’s 2016 Presidential candidates have been using social media to connect with the public. The media interprets and impact discussions made by the public and its candidates, as well as polling and voting. Obama has paved the path since 2008 in using social media to connect with the public, and Obama has been a pacesetting in this year’s presidential candidates. For example, Senator Ted Cruz often appears on Periscope, Marco Rubio snap videos and pictures on Snapchat at stops along his
A new age has developed and society is altering to adapt to new forms of technological communication. Through the use of the vast Internet through the use of social networking, image boards, blog sites and news media, society is altering in a way never seen before. Over the past couple of decades, the use of the Internet has expanded and grown exponentially as new technology develops. Since the introduction of social networking as well as alternative news media sites, the way people interact and communicate has altered. New ideas and discussions have been created. With all of this freedom granted with easy access, society might take advantage of the ability to speak freely as an anonymous source. The personal obsession with imagery is lost because the users of the Internet are judging based on a screen name and nothing more. The ability to have an alternate persona allows users a freedom of speech and thought never granted before and can be erased and created with only a few clicks. We see that true opinion and reasoning among society varies on the anonymity of the commenter, where as one is more likely to be more holistic and honest if their imagery isn’t entirely threatened by the judgment of their peers, but because of many networking sites, individualism is lost; specifically, society’s lack of expression of true free thought and in reality because of social constraints.
The Arab Spring has impacted multiple countries in northern Africa and the Arab world so far since the end of December 2010, leading to the fall of the government in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Among the unarmed insurrections, social media and social networking technology functioned as a new strategy that empowered the protesters to gain successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and inspired grassroots movements in other Arab countries. The new media, namely Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, with online blogs and mobile telecommunications, played a significant role in the politics of connectivity, which connect, coordinate and communicate the protestors. Labeled as “Twitter Revolution” or “Facebook Revolution”, the new media to some extent engaged in the Arab Spring uprisings. By analyzing more than three million tweets on Twitter, content on YouTube and thousands of blog posts, a study led by analysts from the University of Washington finds that social media played a critical role in shaping political debates in the movements during the Arab Spring.
Weiwei, Z., (2011) The China Wave - Rise of a Civilizational State. (World Century Publishing Corporation).
The number of revolutions in the last 3 decades has increased, and seems to keep increasing. Civil unrest and protests brought many victims including civil and political figures throughout the world. In the era where technology is at the peak of its success, especially in communication technologies, mankind suffers from lack of communication. Problem is not caused by the technology itself, the problem is in human nature. I will continue with an analogy. Man invented the knife, which is very useful tool in our daily lives. The problem occurs when one thinks about the purposes that knife could be used. Story repeats itself with Newspapers and News Media. Technology improved the speed and the size that news can reach anywhere in couple of seconds. In a few seconds we can reach our friend at the other pole of the globe and receive pictures and live videos in response. We can send information, receive it and even create it in the artificial world. Life has become easier with technology. We can control our cell phones with voice command and reserve a table in the closest restaurant for dinner. Technology is everywhere in our lives, but if we think for a second the purposes we could use them for then the danger begins. In this short essay I will be talking about the struggle of mankind for freedom and the stages it went through. There are 3 parts to my paper. In the first part I will discuss the birth of World Wide Web and how the purpose of it went through changes. In the second part, I will be talking about birth of newspapers in the Web, precisely how it developed into an intermediate body that transfers information to people. Ultimately, I will discuss the Ukrainian revolution and the role of the news media in it and ho...
With the recent Canadian Federal Election, there has been a wide range of biased, misinformed posts on social media. These posts often tend to lead to heated discussions and debate. By interpreting the accuracy of the information portrayed, as well as the context of the situation, including personal opinion, we can develop an understanding of the use of rhetoric and discourse by individuals in regards to the political debate. In addition to this primary source, a variety of articles that discuss the use of rhetoric on social media, as well as the use of social media in a political context, will be addressed. Many articles may discuss social media and its implications on society, and privacy, but fewer deliberate the effects social media may have on impacting citizen’s political perspectives. The use of language on social media, especially in younger generations, tends to be rudimentary and as a result may not be adept in representing the issue. This tends to leave the discussion open for personal interpretation and often leads to misinformation. By looking at the use of rhetoric on social media in general, as well as the use of social media for political discussion, I intend to develop and support this
From the words of United States President Barack Obama "Call your members of Congress. Write them an email. Tweet it using the hashtag #My2K." (Coffee). Social media has played an increasing and larger part in today's government. Social media has the power to influence elections and connect the people to the policy makers in new ways.
The use of social media has risen exponentially in the past decade, and with it the impact of its ubiquity has become evident. Although social media can undoubtedly be a positive vehicle for self expression and social interaction, it is largely restrictive of personal liberty and subsequently does more harm than good. Though this applies primarily to the individual, the negative effects of social media on personal freedom extends to interpersonal relationships and can therefore negatively affect groups as well. The convergence of audiences and associated privacy concerns on social media sites like Facebook can result in self-censorship, while the inbuilt filtering systems create a sense of censorship. Data collection and surveillance make it
Social media can impact a life of an individual at many levels. On social media, each individual has the power to be influential and important. There is a freedom of expression on soci...
Social media is a controversy topic in today’s society. Some people think that social media destroys human interaction and real life human relationships. While others think that social media is a bless to humanity. Social media makes human interaction much more convenient and much faster than real life human interaction, it makes globalization a reality, it gives a chance for introverted people to express themselves, and it also benefit develop international relationships whether its business or social.