Clicktivism And Social Activism

Introduction Soon after its birth, the internet has transformed many people’s daily lives. For example, they acquire a new way to receive information, a new platform to communicate with others, and a new medium to transmit one’s ideas. People have changed many of their habits due to the appearance of the internet, but these transformations might not always be positive or commonly accepted. For example, because of the rise of the internet, a new form of social activism raises and is called “clicktivism”. Compare to conventional activism, clicktivism uses social media and the internet as a method to promote a cause and requires fewer efforts in participation. These changes brought by the internet and social media on social activism might …show more content…
Many scholars have tried to examine clicktivism via theoretical approaches. For example, in Max Hulupka’s article “Clicktivism: A Systematic Heuristics”, the author proposes a new technique to understand clicktivism as a political act and “examines the inability of the current literature to locate and define clicktivism within existing understandings of online activism” (Halupka 116). As Halupka argues, the lack of commonalities between two camps of opinions is due to the inadequate definition of clicktivism and therefore distinguished from other online activities such as campaigns or online advocacy. Jennifer Earl, in her article “Pursuing Social Change Online: The Use of Four Protest Tactics on the Internet”, also tries to have a more well-rounded comprehension of online activism through investigating four online activist tactics through five basic structural questions. Both Halupka and Earl tries to investigate the function of clicktivism and similar online activism through redefining the …show more content…
For the first part, I would explore the participant's interests and engagement after approximately a year of the initial protest. For this part, I plan to utilize the information presented by Conover, Ferrara, Menczer, and Falmmini in their article “The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street”. Their data is generated through collecting tweets information from the Twitter. I believe this source will provide a rather well-rounded analysis on the situation of “Occupy Wall Street” from the start of the protest to fifteen months after. For the second part, I would look into the current (2017) situation of “Occupy Wall Street” movement. However, for this section, I would be focusing not only on the participant’s interests and engagement in 2017 but also what has the movement accomplished for the past 6 years. I will be interested in acknowledging the progress of this clicktivism and finding out the difference in social development before the protest and