Social media has changed the way that people interact with one another for the rest of time. People can use social media to share their lives, opinions, and more importantly their political views. Some of the most popular social media platforms are Facebook, where one can post their own thoughts along with pictures and video, Twitter, where one posts short messages, Instagram, where one posts pictures along with captions, Tumblr, where one can post a variety of different media, and Snapchat, where one can share videos and picture with their friends for a short amount of time. Now that people are able to share whatever they would like on the internet, some have used this as a way to spread political initiatives through these platforms. Social …show more content…
media activism is becoming a new term, which is anyone “who uses social media to further socio-political interests” (Lau 2017). In particular, young adults use social media not only to share their lives but to also share their opinions of politics and current events through tweeting, sharing videos, and making their own posts.
From the #BlackLivesMatter to the Parkland survivors, young adults use social media in a positive way to bring justice to the people they feel as though do not have a voice in the regular media. Additionally, these movements connect with Staar, the protagonist of The Hate U Give (THUG), because she also uses social media as a way to give people another view to her friend Khalil who was murdered by a police officer. All of these different movements have been created by young adults, with the purpose of changing the way people think about current issues. Young adults are able to use social media platforms to become social activists and create positive …show more content…
change. In The Hate U Give, Staar becomes a political activist in her own before her friend Khalil was murdered by the police. On her own person Tumblr, she shared pictures of Emmett Till, a young black boy who was murdered for whistling at a white woman (Thomas 77). Just by sharing this picture, she conveyed her beliefs on the injustice of this Emmett Till being murdered. While she uses her social media to share her political beliefs, she brings to light a situation of injustice. Staar continues this trend of social activism when she creates a new Tumblr for her friend Khalil, called “The Khalil I Know”. While she knows Khalil as a friend who was funny, the news portrayed him as a drug dealer who was in a gang. She uses this blog to shed a different light on Khalil, a side that not many people may know. “In just two hours hundreds of people have liked and reblogged the pictures. I know it’s not the same as getting on the news like Kenya, but I hope it helps. It’s helping me at least” (Thomas 205). Staar received validation for her feelings by having people like and share the picture within hours. She showed people that Khalil was a person, not just a statistic or a drug dealer. Although Khalil no longer had a voice, Staar’s social media gives him one. With this blog, Staar expanded the picture of how people viewed Khalil, which would have been more difficult to share without using social media. Nevertheless, while Staar is just one of the examples of how young adults have been able to bring justice to others, one of the most significant movements being the Black Lives Matter movement (Stephen 2015). This movement gained popularity in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing a young black man, Trayvon Martin. People used the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter across a variety of social media platforms to share their outrage in the trial. The hashtag then moved on to be more of a social cause to bring a voice to black people who often do not have one. Young black people used this hashtag to share their experiences with institutional racism to police brutality. “#BlackLivesMatter isn’t solely about affirming the lives of victims of police brutality. It’s about affirming the value of all Black Life” (@zellieimani). This hashtag creates awareness about the discrimination that black people were still experiencing, and to validate their own lives. People who do not normally have a voice, now do with social media. Black young adults are able to use social media to have their voice heard, and to make a change. Through this hashtag, young adults have been able to educate others about their experience with discrimination, and bring light to their own situations. Additionally while social media created a movement about discrimination, social media can be used to create discussion around the Second Amendment. In particular, the Parkland Survivors went to twitter to share their frustration and concerns about people being allowed to have access to firearms that can kill people within seconds. “With their consistent tweeting of stories, memes, jokes and video clips, the students have managed to keep the tragedy that their school experienced — and their plan to stop such shootings from happening elsewhere — in the news for weeks, long after past mass shootings have faded from the headlines” (Bromwich 2018). These high school students chose to take action after the shooting that they all went through, to make a powerful change in government. Rather than just making more awareness about gun violence, they took to social media to create a march called March For Our Lives, which became international with over 800 marches across the world on March 24th. The students took to Twitter to make the day popular, and to create more awareness about the event. They were able to make a change through their social media about what others thought about the access to firearms, and also create enough awareness to make politicians aware of their situation. While the Parkland survivors used Twitter to create action, others use videos on social media to create attention to their situation. For the teachers in Oklahoma, they created videos that they shared to social media to show the conditions within their school. These conditions had doors that did not work, chairs that were broken in every part, and books that were from the 1960s (VICE News). Even though they did not think that their posts would go viral, millions of people watched their video through sharing it on Facebook with their friends. The video was able to make awareness about the conditions in schools, and more importantly was able to make a change because so many people sent supplies to the school after the post went viral (NowThis News). Social media allows people become activists and make a change about a variety of topics such a school conditions. Because these posts about the schools went viral, the teachers in Oklahoma are going on strike for better conditions within schools. They were able to voice their beliefs on behalf of the children in their schools who do not have a voice for themselves because they are so young. While some social media becomes positive, it can also have a humorous effect.
When protesting certain things, people turn to humorous images called memes to gain traction on social media and to bring awareness about their cause. One of these humorous images was a picture of a popular TV cartoon, SpongeBob which was used to make fun at politicians at the March For Our Lives protest (@bynickdean). While this was meant to be lighthearted, it actually made people more aware about the social issues the march was creating because it was using a picture that many people recognized. Often times people turn to these humorous images to have others who are not typically motivated by political tweets to have them become aware of the issues they are trying to voice. These memes can be used in protest signs, and even spread across social media to gain
traction. Overall, social media allows people to voice their beliefs in ways that the public has never seen before. While a simple sharing of a post or creating a video to share injustice is all different ways that people can become a social media activist. Even when social media it studied, there are positive impacts of social media regarding activism. “Studies of online civic participation, dovetailing with the notion of activists reaching out to wider publics in online blogs and forums, show that these non-political spaces allow individuals to more fully engage in political activity” (Moscato 2016). Although people use social media for enjoyment and a pastime, it can be a way to change the world. Just like Staar in The Hate U Give, everyone can take action and take part in a movement that they are passionate about. Social media can be used for positive change, and will continue to make positive change. Within the next few years, social media may change completely from what we currently know it. The internet changes quickly, but this also means that so can people’s beliefs. Through social media activism, activists will be help change people’s beliefs and the world.
Because the justice system isn’t always in favor of the innocent, people have started to stand up for their rights. Whether it is by protesting or even showing their support on social media, this nation’s youth is standing up to these injustices and demanding their rights back. They are a community standing together against injustice. Social media has paved a way that allows today’s youth to connect and collaborate in order to achieve this. They come together through art, music, literature, protests, etc. to illustrate their support. Social media allows the entire world to see what is really happening. Instead of being fed information by the media, they are able to hear and listen to the people who have been silenced. They are able to share experiences with one another, which results in the community available today
#BlackLivesMatters is more than a hashtag, it is a social liberation movement. Coming to fruition in 2012 after the infamous Trayvon Martin murder case, Black Lives Matter was born as a reaction to the great injustice this case displayed towards a young black teen. As a social movement Black Lives Matter uses multiple communicative methods to spread their message. By combining traditional methods like peaceful protests called StandUp in their events calendar, with contemporary communication applications like Twitter, Black Lives Matter has gained much support and power. The key to the buzzing conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter can be attributed to their integration of popular communicative techniques, specifically Twitter. By combining
In the current time, it seems like one cannot go a day without using at least one social media website. This might be especially true among groups of teenagers and young adults. Social media became a vital part of daily life that feeds people with several types of information constantly. Political news is a type of information that can reach the people through the means of social media. Since presidents are constantly seeking new strategies to increase their communication with the public in order to spread their political message, they utilize the different social media websites. Hence, social media became a platform to spread political message. It is not surprising that now the majority of political officials and candidates have social media accounts more than ever before, such as a Twitter account.
For many young people who should be acting on behalf of their generation's issues, reality and social media have become far too close. Gladwell makes a terrific analogy in order to prove this point, saying "The evangelists of social media...they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend". The reason that people prefer to repost articles and pictures about a cause, rather than act on it, is because of the low risk while online. This can be compared to how a bully may hide behind a message board instead of involving themselves in real action. This social media activism is completely safe compared to the real activists throughout American history, who risked their lives to defend a cause. "Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations are high risk strategies", Gladwell argues, speaking of the Greensboro lunch counter protests and Martin Luther King Jr.'s marchers. "We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro", Gladwell warns. If this generation could learn to see past the safety behind a computer and stand up in reality for what they believe in, perhaps there could be a change or even a
Many students do not understand what happens in the real world, without fictional book students may never know what goes on outside of their own world. Every person goes through something different, and fictional literature is one way to express that. Therefore, the school board should not remove fictional text from the student’s curriculum. Some fictional texts have certain situations such as; self confidence, oppression, and racism. For example, the novel, The Hate U Give deals with this certain situations as the main character struggles to find her voice and has to face oppression and racism.
“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality if often pathetic.” - Young-Ha Kim. Fiction is able to interpret reality in ways that are easier for people, especially the youth, to understand. It is able to show the truths of reality through a story that may not be 100% true, but is based on events that are. The novel, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, is based on the life of a teenage black girl who lives two seperate lives, one in the “hood” and the other at a preppy private school. When her best friend is unjustifiably murdered by a white cop, anarchy rises within the community. This novel interprets what occurs in everyday life for someone like the main character, Starr, who has to deal with gangs, police brutality,
Imagine a world where the physically weak have a powerful weapon to fight against the strong. In this kind of world, that mean kid who beats you up, steals your lunch money, and copies your math homework has no power, whereas the weakling who gets his lunch money stolen has all of it. Through the aid of social media, individuals, teens in particular, who are usually quite docile have a chance to fight back at their oppressors, or they might, in the heat of the moment, begin to victimize someone else.
Today’s young adults live a life caught between two worlds: the physical realm of human interaction and the digital universe that sits just a mouse click away. This is an age in which entire relationships are formed over online digital platforms, and a single person’s opinion can be broadcasted worldwide in a matter of milliseconds. Lately, the freedom of expression that social media has given young adults has provoked interesting behavior among users of such social media platforms as Facebook and Twitter. The term “slacktivism” was coined as far back as 1995 by Dwight Ozard and Fred Clark as an expression of doing something in support of an issue or cause that requires minimal personal effort (Kain, 2012), and is now used to describe this new behavior; where everyday activists have taken their causes to the Web in search of exposure and support, and users have found a passive way to support the causes that they claim to believe in. Every day, hundreds of new slacktivist-oriented pages and videos sprout up across Facebook and Twitter, and slacktivist supporters rush to “like” the cause and pass it along to other friends in their network. This, however, is not the only form of slacktivism. It is also evidenced in the statuses of the numerous members of the Facebook and Twitter community. The role of the “status update” and the “tweet” has evolved from reporting a person’s physical activities, into a platform for launching whatever propaganda a user deems worthy of sharing with his or her social media community. It would seem that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are providing users with a false sense of ego, and that this – in turn – has contributed to the monumental rise of slacktivism and consequential degradat...
As low levels of 'conventional' participation are being noted, the pattern of participation in political matters is changing. Political protest is on the rise in all of its forms from petition signing (demanding the least commitment) to public demonstrations and violent protests (the other extreme) (Moyser, 2003). This essay will focus on political protest in its more extreme form – the form of lawful and unlawful mass protests. In the wake of the 21st century, technology is spreading quickly to every corner of the globe and access to the Internet, smartphones, and computers is easier than ever before. Social media are one of the prominent uses of these technologies, mostly by youth, but use of social media by other demographic semgments of the society are on a rise. The number of social media users is increasing every second and the amount of statuses, tweets, images, and videos they produce is more than overwhelming. There are over 1,15 billion facebook users, and over 500 million of both Google+ and Twitter users with their numbers growing every day (Ajmera, 2013). Also, over 23% of Facebook users log in more than 5 times per day! (ibid) Various kinds of social media brought with themselves new opportunities and methods to express oneself and to gain popular support. They have brought new means and methods of mobilizing society, whatever the objective might be.
Since social media is ubiquitous it provides users the capability of extending their social circle beyond their neighborhood. Evidence proves that, “60% of those who use an online neighborhood discussion forum know ‘all or most’ of their neighbors” ( Pewdie 10) which correlates to local engagement. This is positive as social networking substitutes for some neighborhood involvement and helps build a strong trusting neighborhood. There are 2.03 billion active social media users globally, which depicts not only the prominence of social media worldwide but also how accessible social media is as 25% of social media users are active (We Are Social). Lacking language and distance barriers, social media has helped bring social issues to light as court rulings and government actions are debated online and brought to the attention of government officials. For example, the death of Eric Gardner back in July as the video of a cop choking him to death went viral recently due to social media, which has caused riots and lack of faith in the justice system. With users all across the globe posting their opinions, planning protests and debating on social media, politicians have been forced to discuss the equality of the American justice system as the government’s people are distraught (Salon). Although social media is utilized to connect the world on the negative side of the spectrum, individuals suffer
The ultimate question that comes to the mind of mjourity of youth is WHATS the point when it comes to being able to express your self in real lifewbecause they have already depicted them selkves as the ideal person they want to be and think very highly oifi them selevs. Hence, social media acts as a fuel to the ego of young people where they ideally think it is okay tik show them sleves as perfect online instead of real life. Young people adapt to the speech used in various forms of social media
The purpose of this essay is to develop a further understanding of the impacts of social media in regards to the political debate. By looking at the topic of social media and the use rhetoric in response to politics in the 21st century, a deeper understanding of the issue can be established. Social media has become a primary source for the discussion of politics by the average citizen; whether through the sharing of articles, “memes”, advertisements or personal expository statements. As a result, large sums of information and ideas are spread rapidly to a wide variety of subjects. However, much of this information may not be accurate and could be misinterpreted. Consequently potentially misinformed citizens may not be able to make a properly
The future of the United States government, policy structure, and elections will evolve around the emerging social media. How well politicians and government officials use the technology could shape the policies of our country.
For example, teenagers can be influenced to give back to their community more often, after seeing one of their favorite celebrities or role models doing the same. Furthermore, these role models that are obtained through social networking sites can influence youth to make ethical decisions every day. It can be from something as small as saying “please and thank you” daily or to something as big as being honest in a difficult situation. When used for the right purposes, SNSs can become a platform for tremendous change. In a study about the benefit of social networking sites, the researcher (Verma, 2015) mentions, “SNSs provide a platform for intentional social action in personal, professional, social and political issues besides successfully connecting business to their customers” (p2). The ethically correct side of SNSs are used as a venue for positive change in the world that starts with the youth. For instance, there are users on Youtube that promote random acts of kindness, healthy living, and ethical decision making. In addition, daily use of these social networking sites is providing teenagers with helpful work skills that will be beneficial to their future. In one study, researchers note, “Across the world, Gen Y has grown up with rapid advances in technology; they are comfortable with change. This familiarity means that young people
The correlation between the development of youth and social media has become blatant. Although few of the consequences are favorable, the majority have displayed a negative impact. The drive social media can implement on youth is exceptional. The pressure and strain social media can place on our youth is an enduring force which leads individuals to question themselves as a person and feel inclined to fit a norm expressed in media and social media of our society. The underlying force social media can play in the lives of the youth is astonishing and is a force that must be dealt with and controlled, for it not only holds the power to give an individual strength, but also to break them down.