Collective Action and Social Movements

 Good evening, and welcome back! So this week, we're supposed to look into social movements and how digital media has played into them of late, and this one is going to be somewhat hard, so buckle in. 

When I was in middle school, my TAG teacher delved deeply into the Holocaust and World War II. The ethics of showing real video and media from that era and subject matter to a classroom of 11-year-olds aside, she made an incredibly valuable point. She asked, "Why was this war different? What made it bigger, scarier, and hit harder than any other war before it?" The answer was simple - people could see it. The advent of television being a common household encounter meant that more than picture or video, the average Joe could see the horrors of war. People watched other people suffering and dying in their living room. This technology changed the face of how people interacted with war, because even though wars have always been visceral, terrible events, now it wasn't something the average person could ignore or forget about. In its own way, social media has been the next step in this evolution. 

Before the advent of the internet, something like the BLM movement could not have happened the same way. People watched George Floyd die in living color, and shared it. They talked about it. They were affected by it, seeing yet another person avoidably die in the palm of their hands. Digital media doesn't change the world by itself. It changes how people perceive and react to the world because they are exposed to it. Researchers studying the effects of social media on the "Arab Spring", a time of revolution against dictatorial governments, said this: 

    "Importantly, we see social media as an arena where important social bonds are forged, not merely between individuals, but between an individual and a movement, a person and an idea, or an individual and an ideology." (Source)

Social movements have taken on a new face, able to replicate and spread in grassroots styles in ways they could not before, such as the Occupy movement or the Antifa protests. Both sets of protests did not have a traceable hierarchy, and instead were spontaneous. Flash mobs of indignation and demand for change brought to bear by the connection of digital media. 

Going further in, I researched the so-called "Reddit Frenzy", which is more appropriately labeled the GameStop Short Squeeze. I had trouble finding a cohesive explanation, so I chose to do an interview with one of the Redditors that had watched it live. This is an example of a social movement not only inspired and organized online, but occurring entirely online. I'll post a decent breakdown here, but I'll summarize for the layperson that I was before I deep dove into the strange world of the stock market and Reddit.

This stock broker, who posted on a board for stock amateurs, noticed that a group of rich investors had spent their money betting that Gamestop would fail. This was odd, since Gamestop hadn't announced anything that would usually herald a failure. He looked at a lot of different reports and realized that not only were they intentionally sinking Gamestop, but that they'd put out more money than they could afford to lose (shorted). So he told his friends to buy Gamestop stock to bankrupt the guys who'd bet Gamestop would fail. This spread massively, sending the stock up and the vulture capitalists to the poorhouse. Now, while the original guy reportedly did it for monetary and defiant reasons (the lulz, to use the terminology), this was taken up by the anti-capitalists and frustrated middle class on different Reddit boards as an opportunity to prove to the rich investors (and others like them) that they couldn't just do what they wanted and crash what they decided to because it was Tuesday and they were rich. Morality became attached to the maneuver, and protest was made with money from phones and computers. Online campaigns flooded social media, making certain everyone knew about the coup.

And, to some degree, it worked. The investors went bankrupt, and others like them had to find new ways to invest their money that wasn't so blatantly abusive lest they fall prey to a similar tactic. 

The only issue with this amazing new tool is exhaustion. One voice in the wilderness can call people to action, but a thousand of them becomes a cacophony where people get battered down. According to a Pew Research study, 2/3rds of Americans feel consistently exhausted with "news fatigue" (source) and have trouble identifying purposes. This causes a polarizing effect where people latch onto a single issue and make it more of their identity than perhaps they should, in some cases becoming single-issue voters where their judgment as an informed citizen can become impaired. Others see a general malaise, ceasing to care about important matters because so many of them assault their minds on a constant basis. The news, dialogue, and calls to action don't just come on the 5 'o clock news - they are 24/7 and wired into your palm. To quote the comedian Bo Burnham, "May I interest you in everything, all of the time?" (source)

Digital media has been and will continue to be a vital part of the new, connected world we live in, and a powerful tool for social change, organization, and information. However, we must find a way to find perspective. Instead of being able to truly connect with what we're seeing, it's like the videos of WWII are on mobile televisions that people carried through the streets at all times, the horrors of the war in their eyes every moment of every day. Perspective and means to sort and process the entire world in our pockets is still the question we have to answer in an individual way. 

The methods of helping ourselves keep perspective are also individual, like my habit of putting a picture of an incredibly cute animal at the end of each post. This week, please enjoy a picture of a hamster eating a slice of cucumber, and I will see you next week!

I'll be in tow!