#Activism and #Slacktivism

Slacktivism: A method to spread awareness of a political or social or environmental concern campaign through social media platform with limited effort
An example of slacktivism is retweeting the post and donate some money to the campaign. A way to support a campaign without effecting your everyday routine, making you feel proud of yourself for doing something small and nice.
An example of slacktivism is #thedress
The campaign #thedress started as 2 posts on tweeter on March 6, 2015 by salvation army- around the time when the black and blue, white and gold dress was the the star of the social media. One of the post was a woman with bruises wearing the white and gold dress with saying " why is it so hard to see black and gold?" in addition to a fact of "one out of six women are victims of abuse."

The goal was to show the awareness of domestic violence and abuse against women and spread the importance of protecting and recognizing women who are being abused.
This is an example of slacktivism because the readers don't have to do any physical work or actions to contribute to the campaign other than re-tweeting or sharing it.

Activism: a strategy to run a campaign with more actions and  risks to contribute to the campaign.
Activism usually require the people to do some sort of action to achieve a common goal.
Example: #alsicebucketchallenge
The #alsicebucketchallenge involved lots of  people.
People had to film themselves being bumped by a bucket of ice water.
Why? To show the awareness of ALS and how serious the disease is and it patients with ALS need help from other people.
It involved more than just sharing the post and donate money to their campaign.
The donated money are being used on further research on ALS to help with curing the disease.

"The medium is the message."

"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium- that is, of any extension of ourselves- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." 

Look around. Look at the people. Look at how they communicate. Look at how WE communicate.

How do we communicate now? Through callings, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or the medium.

It's hard to believe how much the media had impacted and influenced us. We use them daily, we love them from the bottom of our hearts. We trust them because they made our lives more convenience for sending our opinions and thoughts to others. But, really, are we delivering our messages through the medium or is it the medium delivering the message for us? 

We, the users or the consumers, have the freedom of expressing our thoughts to this vague world, but this mind game made us believe in the freedom we have. The freedom of speech was being controlled and manipulated by the program itself. We maybe the the subjects of an evil project planned decades ago, who knows? 

In 1964, Marshall McLhuan stated, "the medium is the message" in his the book 'Understanding Media: The Extensive Man', and this statement remains true after all these years. The new technology is attracting us to purchase them to follow the "trend",as we say now days. 
The trend is changing our perceptive and value in life. We throw our family, beliefs, society, health, friends and work on the side to use the medium to communicate. Maybe be we use it as a goal, a desire for us when we working on something. For example, we might be, " I will finish this homework first so I use my phone," because I do that all the time. It's kind of like an incentive in a way in life. 
It is terrifying, certainly, but it's faith. This is the REALITY we are living in right now-the one we created, the CRUEL world. 

We use more advanced technology because everyone else is using it, they also want to be part of the majority. They also know the convenience of the product and knows how fast we can connect to each other. All these new technology are leading us to the global village through the medium. 

Honestly, we don't even care about the message being send to the receiver, we cares about the medium, the devices, the APPS used to connect us. 

Alright, right now the media is either in a huge mess or in an organized file of interest. It depends on how you interpret it and how you want to see the reality. Personally, believe it's a huge mess but I'm also a big mess so... yeah. 

Source:

http://weknowmemes.com/2014/05/heavy-breathing-cat-gif/

https://www.pinterest.com/lala20195/goodbye-cruel-world/