Your slacktivism isn't as useless as everyone thinks
Slacktivism, the lazy person's activism, which often involves signing an online petition from one's couch, has been the subject of hate since the term was coined. Now, these armchair activists may have made some real change all from the click of a button.
After months of hashtags, online pleas and banners asking for the U.S. government to get involved in the dispute over an oil pipeline that is planned to go through Indigenous land in North Dakota, it was the so-called slacktivists who brought President Barack Obama into the fray.
The president's response in a Now This interview Wednesday came only days after online support for the protesters went viral on Facebook.
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Suddenly after a violent confrontation between police and protesters at the end of last week (and some celebrity attention), more than one million people opened up Facebook and checked in to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, near where the protest camp has been demonstrating against the Dakota Access Pipeline for the past few months.
It was "slacktivism" at its fullest: getting involved and supporting a cause without needing to leave your desk or couch, or wherever, or even spending any money or much time on the cause.
But in this case the online activism wasn't just a useless gesture.
Sure, the check-ins didn't throw off law enforcement monitoring protesters or prompt the company funding the project, Energy Transfer Partners, to pull out and stop construction of the 1,000-mile pipeline. But it brought a ton of attention to the Indigenous people, environmentalists, climate change advocates, supporters and other activists who have been camped out in an effort to protect the tribal water and land.
"The real positive outcome is it's a cool positive way to stay engaged in the fight," Dallas Goldtooth (Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine), an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network told Mashable about the online support.
"It's a cool positive way to stay engaged in the fight."
Afrin Sopariwala, a climate justice activist based in Seattle with Women of Color Speak Out!, said to Mashable, online attention is the next best thing to going to Standing Rock. "If you can't go, share and post online," she suggested.
She listed plenty of other ways supporters can stand in solidarity without leaving their computers: divest from banks funding the pipeline project; make calls to politicians in Washington, D.C., North Dakota and beyond; and donate money to support protesters on the ground.
She recommended reading up on the history of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the land they are protecting and generally getting informed about the situation, labels of slacktivism be damned.
A feminist gamer blogger, who writes under the name ALEXLAYNE, reflected Wednesday on the recent bout of "slacktivism" hate directed at online-only pipeline protest supporters. She wrote that her views on what she previously categorized as lazy online involvement needed to be updated after seeing the effect the Facebook check-ins had in North Dakota.
"Yes, sharing a video of something does not equal fixing the problem. Yes, other work besides informing others needs to be done. But awareness is step 1," she wrote. "And so many people are PAINFULLY unaware of things that don’t directly affect them."
On Monday morning, people suddenly started wondering why friends and family were checking in to North Dakota, of all places. Even after steady protest coverage had ramped up through many media outlets it wasn't until then, with the overwhelming number of check-ins, that the "Standing Rock" in the "I stand with Standing Rock" slogan started to mean something.
Here's the clear peak in interest the Facebook check-ins created, based on Google searches:
The "slacktivists" may have inadvertently brought the president, mainstream media and a large portion of the general public directly into the conversation about preserving native lands and protecting our waterways. Maybe this one time we should call them plain activists.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
