Whether it’s the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter, all these movements have all benefited from the use of the web. The web has surely changed the way social movements are organized. Social movements are bound to change the way people think and feel. Despite these movements trying to get their main points across, sometimes people do not understand their goals. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third of Americans familiar with Black Lives Matter say they don’t understand the goals of the movement.
Black Lives Matter was started in July 2012 after the murder of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin in Stanford, FL by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was later acquitted of first degree murder. In the years since, there have been several African-Americans that have died in the hands of police. Each case has its own circumstances and facts.
Furthermore, also according to the Pew Research Center, 64% if those who have heard of the movement say they understand the movement’s goals very or fairly well. While 36% of those who have heard about the movement say they don’t understand its goals too well or simply at all. This shows that the internet does not necessarily benefit the knowledge of individuals, but there are some movements and circumstances that make the opposite occur.
Social Movements began in the Progressive Movement in the 1960s. This era was focused on identity and social justice. (Wiesinger, p.102) Going back to the Black Lives Matter movement, according to Wiesinger p. 104, the march on Washington in 2014 drew about 25,000 protestors. This was in part because #BlackLivesMatter was used by millions on social media sites. This made the word get out further than telephone calls or the use of posters around town. This is referred to as “hashtag activism”, meaning the idea of social media is being used for raising awareness to a broad range of causes. It can be used to benefit or work against the movement by the use of posts, according to Wiesinger.
Social movements have the chance to change the way people think and feel. According to wired.com, the Black Lives Matter movement had an impact on the experience of being black in America. Since African-Americans are bound to feel more threatened by police nowadays, police departments across the United States have started to require their officers to wear body cameras to record interactions with one another so that an incident in question has some proof to back it up. This movement succeeded in the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol and convinced the Justice Department to investigate the actions of the police in Ferguson, after the Michael Brown shooting death and in Baltimore, when Freddy Gray suffered a severed spine by police and as a result died. (Wired.com black lives matter article)
The Web and social media can affect the way people feel and act about the movement. According to Aljazeera.com, tweets that relate to the Black Lives Matter movement suggest that people are more likely to feel sadness and not so much anger. Sadness can make people want to participate. Social media can also pit one organization against another. An example of this is police unions from time to time speak out against the Black Lives Matter movement. The aim is to try and get the public to realize that some of the members of the movement are doing is “illegal and immoral behavior,” according to Aljazeera.com. The public can have conflicted opinions as a result of this.
In the case of the Arab Spring, the movement pit the government against its very own people. The use of social media helped these people gain international attention, as this was a very hot topic for the media and it was extensively covered, according to wired.com. The Arab Spring started in 2011 when the citizens of Cairo demanded the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the country’s top leader. The main organizers of the movement were the youth. Thus, making use of the social media was not much of a challenge. It was a challenge when the government issued a brief shutdown of the internet but they found other ways of communication. The use of social media ultimately helped with the resignation of Mubarak and other leaders, according to the Pew Research Center. Many networks online were formed and the communities were urged to use all resources, such as the internet, mobile phones, and social media. Social media helped news organizations gain information about the movement because they relied on interviews and eyewitness views and videos for information and content, according to Weisinger, p. 103. This would be an example of collective logic, which helps groups organize and helps people meet on the local level. Collective action, as with other movements in the past, such as the 1963 March on Washington, which drew around 250,000 protestors, thanks to Martin Luther King., Jr.
In conclusion, it is clear that social media and the web has benefited many movements, such as Black Lives Matter and the Arab Spring. Though there have been positives and negatives, social media is credited with having all the movements expand and get themselves well known. Social media will always have the potential to spread the word and by using hashtags, that will create more awareness to each them. Whether the use of social media/the web is big or small, the meaning is not always clear to some.
Mattricker.org 