On Kings Highway in Cherry Hill, Unitarian Universalist Church members stand in solidarity with Ferguson residents protesting the grand jury finding in Michael Brown's death. (TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer)
'Nothing should
be normal or everyday about accepting all this," says Ferguson, Mo.,
Democratic committeewoman Patricia Bynes. "Social media has helped ensure
the images and agony stay fresh in people's minds."
Ferguson stays fresh. On Sunday,
members of the St. Louis Rams did a pregame salute in protest of what they saw
as police violence in the fatal Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown. That angered
the St. Louis Police Association, which called on the National Football League
to punish the players. The league declined.
On Monday, demonstrations
around the nation - including at Drexel University and the University of
Pennsylvania - organized around the #HandsUpWalkout hashtag. Protesters left
schools or workplaces in solidarity with Brown, at the time of day of his
shooting, 12:01 p.m. Central time, or 1:01 p.m. Eastern time. Rallies briefly
clogged Market Street near the universities. T. Stokes of Philadelphia tweeted:
"You know it's real when there's a police helicopter flying above your
protest."
The year 2014 has been the year
of social media as social protest. Again and again, people have used Twitter
hashtags, Facebook posts, Vine videos, Instagram photos, and messages on
WhatsApp, WeChat, and many other media to support and organize rallies, often
on behalf of marginalized or mistreated groups. Racial injustice has been the
issue in Jacksonville, Fla., (in the Michael Dunn trial) and Ferguson. It was
gender-related violence in the Ray Rice controversy and the Isla Vista, Calif.,
shootings.
Worldwide, Muslims resurrected
the venerable #NotInMyName hashtag to protest Islamist extremism.
Demonstrators in Mexico and China use social media to organize and campaign.
And all over the world, video game players joined in the #GamerGate controversy.
So, no question, this is
happening. But bigger questions loom.
Charles Gallagher, chair of the
sociology, social work, and criminal justice department at La Salle University,
asks: "What kind of legs do social media protests have? Do they change
anything? Or is it all just 'slacktivism,' the lazy, next-to-useless
click-and-take-credit social in-activism of the 2010s? No large-scale studies
as yet can answer that question."
It's worth noting, though, that
the Oxford English Dictionary welcomed slacktivism into its pages this year. It's a
thing.
It's certainly a thing in China
and Mexico, with massive, long-term protests honed and organized by social
media.
The "Umbrella Movement"
in Hong Kong was fanned by a viral image of a man waving off tear gas with his
umbrella during a Sept. 29 protest, largely of students, against mainland
control over local elections. "It wouldn't have had that name without
social media," says James Carter, professor of history at St. Joseph's University.
Within days, a statue of "Umbrella Man" had gone up as a symbol of
protest. Carter says that hashtags such as #umhk "helped unify diverse
protest groups under this one" - pun intended - "umbrella term."
The protest is now into December, with government troops closing public squares
and arresting demonstrators.
In 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen
Square, Carter recalls, "it was the 'cutting-edge' fax machine that got
the story to the outside world. That's dwarfed by the number of ways you can do
that now. The government knows the world is watching." Authorities tried
to throttle Twitter and the "Chinese Facebook," Weibo, but "the
protesters are media-savvy, having grown up with social media and
smartphones," Carter says. They did ends-around on censorship, turning to
one-to-one media such as WhatsApp and WeChat to warn of crackdowns, organize
meetings, and get out the story.
In Spanish, the phrase ya
me cansé means
"I've had enough" or "I'm tired of this now." In the wake
of the horrible Sept. 26 disappearance of 43 students during a demonstration in
Iguala, Mexico, allegations arose that the town's mayor was in league with
local narco-terrorists. The students have not been found, and national outrage
exploded, over both their disappearance and the larger issue of the paralyzing,
savage lawlessness in Mexico.
"These larger issues are
systemic in Mexico," says Mark Lashley, professor of communication, who
studies social media at La Salle University. "It's fascinating to see its
expression on social media there."
After a long and bitter news
conference on Nov. 7, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam said, "Ya me
cansé" and tried to leave. Those words soon were shoved down his throat
via the Twitter hashtag #yamecanse. According to
tracking site Topsey, it was used more than 3.6 million times in November.
"That phrase," Lashley says, "was tailor-made for a social-media
backlash. This is a substantial movement poised to continue, and you're seeing
lots of creative uses of the hashtag, both in the demonstrations
themselves" - in which protestors sometimes lie down and pretend to sleep
or be tired - and in YouTube videos and editorial cartoons, taking government
down a notch and allowing social media to work as the people's voice.
The door of the National Palace
on the Zócalo in Mexico City was set ablaze. On Nov. 20, tens of thousands
marched down the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City and gathered in the Zócalo.
Sympathy protests arose in New York; Geneva, Switzerland; and Cologne, Germany.
So - do such media-driven
protests "work"? It can be very hard to tell. In Jacksonville,
Michael Dunn, who fired a gun into a van and killed a black man, was sentenced
to life without parole on Oct. 17. In Ferguson, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot
Michael Brown, was not indicted, but he now says he is leaving the police
force. On Monday, the White House published a report and guidelines on
"Strengthening Community Policing." On the other hand, the Chinese
protest seems as if it's being scuttled. And there have been arrests in Mexico
- but not of those being accused.
So the question remains:
When is social-media protest just slacktivism, and when is it something more?
And how do we know when it's working?
