wub wrote:magma wrote:What do YOU think, wub?
Too many people think that clicking a link or sharing something on social media counts as protesting, basically.
Oh, you changed your profile pic? Fantastic, that will really show them you mean business! Bollocks like that, basically. It's on a par with 1m likes to get a new kidney or some such rubbish.
It worries me, it has done for a while. The social media wave means people do less and less real world stuff. Apathy isn't so much a problem as it is a symptom. I found myself last night wondering what an EMP would do, and once I got past the initial mental shopping list of what I'd loot from the supermarket to get me through the first week or so, it was like I stopped caring. About any of this. All this online rubbish. It's a blessing and a curse, you've got whatever you want on tap in terms of information and media, but at the same time it desensitises you to the outside world.
The feeling of detachment is really growing for me with all of this, it's a strange feeling. Not isolation so much as the aforementioned apathy...I've started giving a lot less of a shit since leaving London for obvious reasons, so the UK based dissent seems really distant, and the exposure I am getting to it through social media seems forced, or at worst insincere. People retweeting for the sake f it, not giving any real thought to what they're clicking through.
Even the Today Show seems a long way away, and it got me through a lot. But it's irrelevant, for the most part. Or maybe I've switched off caring about those aspects of what once affected me.
Good post, this makes sense to me.
I wonder if a bigger proportion of your worry stems from being distant than actual activism taking place... it honestly strikes me that although we are now all forced to wade through a page of Newsfeed activism in order to catch up with our friends, the Internet has done amazing things for the ability of humanity to protest - I certainly find out about more marches than ever before. Avaaz and 38 Degrees might swell their petition numbers with hundreds of thousands of people clicking "Me TOO!", but they've also had some genuinely impressive results that I don't think would've been so swiftly achieved without the Internet.
As examples, 38 Degrees have:
- Forced coalition to scrap plans for limits on GP visits
- Forced Olympic sponsors NOT to use the tax loopholes they'd been offered during the Games
- Scrapped government plans to sell off national forests
- Inspired a bill to stop animal cruelty in circuses
- Got the Government to sign up to climate change and human trafficking treaties
- Paid for ads to name/shame corporate tax dodgers
- Stemmed the rise of US-style "Mega Dairies" in the UK
- Forced an investigation into Rupert Murdoch's bSkyb takeover which eventually led to him ditching it
- Forced Theresa May to offer asylum to an Iranian lesbian artist and activist who was due to be deported and faced torture/execution on her return.
- Forced debate on corporate lobbying and campaign funding which eventually led to a bill going through Parliament a month or so ago.
And others that I'm less excited about.
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/campaigns/achievements
