Joshua O’Keefe
Dr. Kyburz
College Writing
2
13 October 2015
Slacktivism
via Social Media
I see posts every day on social
media to promote causes such as feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, or
helping refugees. This had me thinking a lot about whether people actually feel
a sense of accomplishment or a connection to others or a cause when they share
or like posts such as these. Just how successful are these posts in promoting
the causes they detail?
One consequence of social media news
is people posting in order to promote or support a cause in order to form an
identity of a person who cares. Posts of Syrian families in distress are making
their rounds on social media, but it is often questioned whether these photos
are seen of as real people, or another topic to make a status about. This leads to another consequence of
depersonalization from one another, as problems such as these are seen through
a digital screen, which makes it difficult to form a physical connection with
the post topic. This leads to a final consequence of the rarity of updates on
social media as to what happens after these posts are made, and social media
just tends to move onto the next injustice, without every really showing if
liking, sharing, and spreading these posts makes a real life change to those
effected.
If we could think about why we post
these activist posts, we would see that more personalization needs to be done,
possibly through the poster relating the post to an event in their own life. If
this happened, more would get more done than just hitting the like button and
moving onto the next crisis while forgetting the last, and would begin to undo
the dehumanization and depersonalization social media causes.
