EDITORIAL: Social Media – a tool for empowerment and change!

Daily, billions of people around the world use social media, and the numbers keep growing while traversing generational gaps. So much so, that it has been stated that grandparents are now the fastest growing users on Twitter. We use social media in every part of our lives, whether it be personal relationships, studies, work or entertainment. In fact, every minute, social media users collectively send more than 30 million messages on Facebook, and almost 350 000 tweets. What started off as just a means to keep in touch with friends and share photos, has now become a force for societal change. Social media has become a platform, which is used to shed light on, and deepen conversations about critical social and political issues, and mobilise and crystallise change via online protests and social resistance.

 

This has never been more evident as it is now in relation to what is referred to as the “hashtag unity”. In recent times, hashtag campaigns have not only effected change in legal and health areas, but also in issues of civil rights and sexual violence. The hashtag #DelhiGangRape played a significant role in bringing to light the culture of violence and rape in India by thrusting the issue under the world’s close scrutiny, and no doubt was integral in changing the laws and sexual education of that country. Other hashtag campaigns like #IceBucketChallenge have raised a record-breaking $220 million in funds for the mission of the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Association. Most readers would know of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which appeared on Twitter almost 11.8 million times and has been used frequently to support the broader social movement or to flag racial issues to engage broader discussions about race in the US. 

 

Closer to home, hashtag #LifeInLeggings, born out of our very own local community, has gained regional traction and given a new voice to the plight of women in relation to sexual harassment, rape and other social ills. #LifeInLeggings encourages women to share their sexual assault experiences on their Facebook timeline. The hope is that these women’s experiences will create or awaken awareness in their male friends that their sisters, their mothers, their daughters, and their friends from every walk of life are still grappling with these fundamental issues. Many men have responded to reading the accounts on this platform and have stated that they would rethink their interactions with women and would appeal to others to do the same. Such is the power of social media!

 

As we look across various social movements, and that is what we are experiencing today, a social movement, it is clear that digital activism has become very important. Not only is it self-rewarding for people to have a “stage” on which to voice their opinions and images independently and to find like-minded views; social media by bringing all these voices together, has made your social opinion and my social opinion and the opinion of countless others become one voice and thus has indeed created social change by the sheer strength of numbers. Social Media is not going anywhere, and as smartphones and smart devices become more and more ubiquitous, it is likely that we will only continue to see it directing and influencing world events to an even higher degree than it is today.