Can clicktivism ever replace activism?

You can learn a lot about the two main political parties in the race for government this election by looking at their online output. While Labour went hard on social media, creating shareable videos that succinctly explained their messages to a plugged-in public – harnessing support from Russell Brand and Steve Coogan – the Tories did nothing of the sort, a move that perhaps mirrors the party’s outdated, elitist, world view.

Anyone watching the two party's respective campaigns might have felt from its stiff, impersonal stance that the Conservative party campaign simply didn't want to stoop to the level of social-media interaction.

It's an oversight that seems absurd given the symbiotic relationship that has always existed between politics and the media. By 1960, 90% of US households owned a television. Three years later, the most famous political speech of all time was delivered to an audience of millions. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ tells us as much about the media landscape of the time as it does about civil rights.

The movement had found a platform capable of disseminating its message to a global audience of millions. So persuaded were those who tuned in by King’s expert delivery of sorrow and determination, that an otherwise unprompted slew of protests took place in his name throughout the 1960s.

It stands to reason then, that social media ought to function in much the same way. Over the past ten years, it has been leveraged for the promotion of political ideas, from the emergence of online petition sites such as Change.org and Avaaz, to grass-root causes emerging from hashtags such as #Blacklivesmatter. If television had once given voice to campaigns of the 1960s, censorship and conservative editorial policies had soon put audiences on edge.

Many of us no longer trust its authority. Yet with the arrival of Twitter, Facebook and mobile technology, an opportunity was granted to circumnavigate the top-down editorial policies that had become little more than conduits of corporate interest.

On the rocky road from Bebo to Periscope then, social media had finally landed in a respectable place. Precocious upstarts with a-symmentrical haircuts promoting their amateur DJ careers were steadily replaced by smart, ambitious agents of social change. Clicktivism or Activism 2.0 really did have the chance to change the way young people engaged with politics.

“Social media has provided a platform for marginalised communities who are not represented by mainstream media outlets, run by huge corporations,” explains Patrisse Cullors, who along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometti, launched the #BlackLivesMatter campaign in the US last year. Beginning life as a hashtag, the name has since been syndicated by some 700 similar protests globally, amplifying the rallying cry of an emerging civil rights movement protesting the fatal oppression of black people at the hands of US law enforcement.

But as Cullors adds, it was nothing without the coordination of people on the ground: “Social media enhances social movements. We don’t need social media for social movements, we need communities who are organised and on the front line.”

As King’s speech alone could not have achieved racial equality then, strongly-worded online campaigns cannot hope to affect change. This realisation has cast cynicism over the casual posting of various half-baked petitions by armchair commenters. In recent years it has led to the emergence of the more derogatory term: slacktivism. Which in its more sinister application, can be leveraged for the sake of PR, becoming part and parcel of the embarrassing trend for ‘personal brand building’.

“Any movement that is located primarily on social media might have a PR bite and a PR victory,” explains climate campaigner and Green Party advocate, Tamsin Omond. “But it won't be solid and real enough to build the sorts of resilient communities that we all need if we are realistically going to build new worlds.”

Likewise, as social media has opened up space for resistance, it has also dampened its effect. Overnight people began pledging their support for Save the Elephant to Comb Blue Ivy’s Hair from the comfort of Starbucks, or bed-bound activists started to litter the web with think-pieces informed by the Wikipedia page on Fracking.

Communication had reached saturation point and words had suffered an unprecedented level of inflation and along with them, protest, petitions and political pressure had been dragged into the business of pursuing clicks.
If we want change, tweets and clicks and comments and shares won’t be enough. We need to vote. And if the results don’t reflect our interests, we need to protest.

The effectiveness of a daily slew of emails asking to you sign numerous petitions has more recently come in for heavy scrutiny. Perhaps one of Change.org's most famous applications was to launch a campaign calling for George Zimmerman prosecution for the murder of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin. Despite receiving over 2 million signatures and attracting huge amounts of attention to one of the most controversial miscarriages of justice in recent history, ultimately the campaign could not sway the course of proceedings and Zimmerman was acquitted on 13th July 2013.

So too, Molly Katchpole’s campaign hosted by the site to resist the Bank of America’s introduction of a $5 monthly account fee, only affected change after Obama became a signatory, in what felt like a cynical PR stunt from the White House that inadvertently undermined the very act of petitioning by suggesting that powerful signatories hold more sway than not. Likewise, for the hundreds of thousands of signatories to the ‘Ban Fracking’ campaign, the debate hardly seems to have affected Westminster policy makers.

So is it a fallacy of each generation in believing themselves original, that leads us to assume that protest and politics have fundamentally changed – and not just changed, but improved – on account of social media? Global resistance movements are nothing new after all. Bobby Sands was recognised as a martyr by Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

Red Armies achieved a global network of loosely affiliated factions capable of shaking so-called Western values to their very core. The Arab Spring might have been hastened by social media; its instigators having supposedly attended schools promoting the teachings of organisations such as Freedom House in the USA, the Caucasus and Serbia, of which social media plays no small part. And this certainly helped to coordinate protests. But human beings were perfectly capable of mobilising and organising themselves prior to that.

“In the 1990s, tens of thousands of people would come to Reclaim The Streets or the Anti Globalisation actions all by word of mouth or flyers and stickers,” explains Jamie Kelsey-Fry, author of the Rax Active Citizenship Toolkit and a contributing editor at New Internationalist.

“In the second decade of the 21st century, where your rights and liberties are being eroded, protests draw people in their tens, sometimes in their hundreds and for really major marches, perhaps in their thousands. My impression is that the numbers of those who turn up to protests have been decimated by these technologies. But there are other factors too: purposefully brutal policing to scare people away and the fact that the great march against the war in Iraq had no effect.”

Arguably social media has dampened protest’s edge, which is precisely the key to its success. Martin Luther King’s speech came after weeks of speculation during which national news reports anticipated ensuing riots. It was an exercise in enigma unknown to a world in which oversharing is rife and full disclosure is the mark of celebrity.

Who would have known in the early 1990s that Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams would one day be sharing his daily porridge eating habits via Twitter? Would such a revelation have damaged his infamy? How might Bobby Sands have fared if his daily routine had been broadcast in the way of Chelsea Manning, whose twitter account accrued 50,000 followers within a matter of days?

By replacing our phones, placards and CVs simultaneously, social media has revolutionised protest, petition and activism – but not necessarily for the better. It demands us to be professional, funny, outspoken and opinionated all at the same time. The formidable share the mundane, and the mundane tweet about feminism. The effect is that everyone is a protester and no one is a protester. Acts that might shock initially, are quickly smothered by the applause of establishment-approved pundits.

Nevertheless, this is the world we live in. As Omond elaborates: “For all our criticisms of social media, hundreds of thousands of online connections means knowledge is shared. The problem is this global network can exert mass pressure that complements but can never replace activism.”

Labour have shown that they understand this and more broadly speaking, that they understand the way people interact and consume information. But if we want change, tweets and clicks and comments and shares won’t be enough. We need to vote. And if the results don’t reflect our interests, we need to protest. The ruckus needs to be made on the streets – in the virtual realm unconquered by Octomom, Chris P. Bacon and Tuna the Chiweenie – where the decisions that shape the world are still being made.

Illustrations by Joshua Checkley