“Slacktivism”
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I sat wallflower during a recent and friendly Progressive Exchange email sing-along about lazy activism, or “slacktivism” as it’s now being called. The term seems to have come into being this year and usually refers to activism that occurs online vis-à-vis social media, typically using Twitter or Facebook. (Or both!) It’s pejorative.
While contemplating my own PX ditty (people on Progressive Exchange are sometimes called “PXers”), I decided to blog here first by offering a distinction in terms: social media vs. social-issue media. An older relation to social media, social-issue media more directly refers to the content of the media and related outreach distribution efforts, less the tools. (That Facebook and Twitter are near-synonyms for social media supports this idea.) Social-issue media has been around a lot longer than social media and could arguably include the entire history of print journalism. It’s a broad and deep tradition that uses, and has used, many different methods of communication to carry a message.
In this light, it’s easier to digest a definition of social media as one tool among many for activist efforts. By drawing on this distinction and by using a slightly too simplistic comparison, Facebook and Twitter look more like pencils and paper, and less like Human Rights First End Torture Now campaign, which uses pencils, paper, tweets and friends as a part of an overall agenda. (They also thank you for “taking action” when you sign up for their action alerts and publications.)
For background on the PX discussion, check out Tamar Schiffman’s blog post and this article in Foreign Policy.
And if you’d like to take a gander at an example of social-issue media, try out this year’s Media That Matters Jury Award winner The Next Wave.
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| Posted on July 28, 2009
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