Blog 1

I first started by reading over chapter 6 (The Role of the Media) of my Leaving Cert politics textbook ‘Power And People’. This gave me a good understanding of the topic at hand. Next I began researching why online activism is effective. I chose to do this next to learn more about the topic myself and to gather useful data. While researching this I came across ‘clicktivism’. Clicktivism is defined as ‘the practice of supporting a political or social cause via the internet by means such as social media or online petitions, typically characterized as involving little effort or commitment’. To finish off day 1 i researched into clicktivism and its effects.

Some of my key findings from day 1 are.

•Governments still tend to lag behind activist movements in the use and mastery of new social media (tools.https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200915-the-subtle-ways-that-clicktivism-shapes-the-world)

•Henry Jenkins, a leading american scholar of social movements, argues that the digital age has opened a new era of activism that offers the next generation new avenues into broader political participation. (https://irpp.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2012/11/clicktivism-section.pdf)

•he argues that critics who contend online activism offers only superficial engagement miss the fact that many of these groups are building ground-level organizations from their digital platforms. But he also warns the online community needs to be better educated in the critical thinking and media skills needed to fully defend their causes.