#Activists? or #Slacktivists?

What is activism and slacktivism?

Activism is doing something in support of an issue or causes that takes risk to do it. On the other hand, slacktivism is doing something in support of an issue or causes that requires minimal personal effort. The difference is how people or you are engaged in the campaign. There are many online campaign that has been done in online. Let's look at two of them, and think of whether it is activism or slacktivism.

How can social media spread awareness, address issues, and encourage action and engagement?

Social media spread awareness by sharing one's post, and more shared posts leads to spread the campaign more. Also social media address social issues that could not be known by people which could be unfair. For example, a boy name Ahmed who is Muslim could be safe because of the campaign called  #IStandWithAhmed. Ahmed was a 14-year-old boy who brought homemade clock to school, and got arrested since his teacher thought the clock was a bomb. Even though Ahmed kept trying to say that it was not a bomb, he got arrested. People who knew got upset and tried to release Ahmed and to spread awareness to fix the problem with islamophobic double standard. They made a hashtag, and share the posts. The case was spread quickly in a week, and became very famous so that even Barack Obama participated the campaign. A result was great. Ahmed was released, and he could get help from people who wanted to sponsor the ability of engineering.

How does slacktivism work?

Slacktivism works better when more people participate it in. It causes people to do minimal effort to resolve problems. For instance, Ice Bucket Challenge is the most successive online campaign in a way of slacktivism. Ice Bucket Challenge is a campaign whose purpose is raising awareness of disease called ALS(Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). Originally the campaign was not only for ALS. Participants could choose any charities they want. A golfer called Chris Kennedy started ALS Ice bucket challenge campaign, because one of his relatives was ALS patient.

The campaign worked in the way that nominate people to do ice bucket challenge and post the video in social media. Many people shared the post and nominate another person. Later, it got attention as celebrities started to participate the campaign. Since celebrities had participated, over 115 million dollars were raised. The money is used to invest in developing drugs and medicines to make better treatment to patients. This is a video that shows celebrities' ice bucket challenge.

This campaign became slacktivism even though people did effort to help. Since the campaign got famous, most people just participated although they didn't know the purpose of this campaign. They just wanted to be popular and they did this for their own. However, even that helped the campaign. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the way slacktivism works is that being famous and known to everyone.

Therefore, we cannot say that slacktivism is a bad way to engage. Even though people do not participate fully, they did their effort, and it helped the campaign.