Raising awareness is a lazy objective. Awareness is a given, action is what you want to promote.#BlackLivesMatter #IStandWithAhmed #BringBackOurGirls #Kony2012 #icebucketchallenge What do all of these have in common? These are all campaigns that become popular on the internet and some have achieved many things. But what do all of these internet campaigns have? Slacktivism. Think about a bunch of these campaigns, and what have they done. A bunch of awareness is gathered, but who actually contributes? Most people see these posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, but after we know what they are trying to promote we don't actually help out.
So what are we actually doing?
Most us think that liking and sharing the post makes us an activist and we have contributed to this campaign. Truthfully often times this is almost useless and contributes nothing and is definitely not activism. Let's take Kony2012 for example.Overall this campaign never did reach it's goal because of slactivism. Instead of trying to get people to contribute by getting outside and campaigning, they told people to donate money, share and they would be helping the project. But this didn't result in their goal being met. Why would this have happened?
Slactivism
#Kony2012 didn't achieve anything because actually campaigning was impacted by the people who shared the post. People who share the post get the feeling that they are helping the campaign, but often times visibility is not enough.However, sometimes the actual goal of campaigns is to raise awareness or money, where becoming active off of the internet is almost the same as being active on the internet. This is basically the only time that campaigns can actually accomplish more. Slactivism plagues every corner of the internet and it doesn't help that people think that they have changed a lot of peoples lives when they just annoy their friends on social media. Think about it. How many times have you seen campaigns and want to do nothing about it because you have seen it so many times? Slacktivism does not help campaigns. Activism gets things done.
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