Activism, Social Media, and…
Why Are We Here?
Demonstrators protest the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college in Acapulco, Guerrero state, Mexico, Friday, Oct. 17, 2014. Investigators determined that 28 sets of human remains recovered from a mass grave discovered last weekend outside Iguala, in Guerrero state, were not those of any of the youths who haven't been seen since being confronted by police in that city Sept. 26. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) ORG XMIT: MXEV105 (Eduardo Verdugo)
I was born in 1948. At three years old, there was no dialer on our new phone… just
tell the operator who you want to call.
Talking, learning, sharing… faster
and faster. Communication devices
change us.
November 22, 1963, I was driving 70
mph in a school zone in our new, red Oldsmobile Cutlass, just outside of
Dallas. Dad said, “Judy, pull
over,” after we just heard on the radio about Kennedy being shot. The last assassination I knew of was
Lincoln.
In 1964 my activist brothers refused
to support the Vietnam War and marched against it. No cell phones, FB or Twitter; just newspapers.
Yes. Technology changes when, where, what, and how fast we get
information. And our ever-expanding
technologies in social media let us get active so much quicker and in so many
new ways.
‘Why am I here’ is exponentially
increased to ‘why are we here’ because of our social media today. To know what everyone else is doing can
change my point of view, my mood, my decisions, my beliefs, and my
actions. Now, faster than
ever before.
This author disagrees with Malcolm
Gladwell’s column in the New Yorker (Small Change: Why the revolution
will not be tweeted) when Malcolm says
that social media in not redefining activism. Professor Rutledge gives four good reasons why social
media is redefining activism and advocacy:
~ Public awareness is changed by
social media because it spreads freely and fast changing public policy.
~ Information is frequently obtained from
our friends on FB, Twitter, etc., giving us word-of-mouth validation.
~ Social media technologies cross over
networks and give immediate impact showing urgency, and can raise donations
quickly.
~ Social media technologies let us act
fast about large and small issues and feel involved.
Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., M.B.A., is Director of the Media Psychology Research Center and
teaches media psychology at Fielding Graduate University and UCLA Extension. Read her article here:
I talked a lot about activism in my previous Green
Blog… so I’ll take this to a more
personal level here, and talk about my cell phone. Because all it takes is a cell phone now to be socially active
and affect the very meaning of your life.
Everyone I know has a smart phone but me and it often appears their cell
IS the meaning of their lives.
So here is my little LG TracFone in front of a sepia
toned self portrait of my shadow I shot in 1974…. against a huge
Morton Bay fig tree in San Diego.
Then I squeezed it into my cell, don’t even remember how; couldn’t do it
again.
What is it going to feel like when I bite the bullet
and get a smart phone? Yes. I’m scared. Because this is an even bigger jump for me than Rabi Tzvi
Freeman who writes about upgrading to a smarter smart phone:
“And once it’s in the Cloud, it’s so much easier to
share with others. On our devices, each of us is in our own world. We
communicate, we interact, but the devices—they divide us. But there, in the
Cloud, it’s all one. So easy to create that synergy that comes through
sharing.
Looking into his eyes, I saw he was confident and
earnest. I trusted him. I had to move on in life."
Freeman’s upgrade story tugs at my heart and funny
bone ~!~ So relieved to find
another human is attached to their old cell like I am mine. Check it out.
I tell myself I’ve got an iPad, a macbook pro 15”
screen with disc drive, a huge mac desktop… I don’t need to go online every
second.
Yet, I think about Cairo. I think about photojournalism and the gazillions of photos I
take. Could I make a difference? You bet.
How hard can it be?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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