Speaking Up

Preliminary thoughts on advocacy and the internet. April 2014.

I haven’t been an “activist” for long. I am probably not even a very good activist.

In fact, I often worry that I’m only interested in advocacy because I’m a freshman at college and these are the years when you’re most likely to be “edgy” and “counter-cultural”. Am I becoming interested in advocacy against a backdrop of older generations “not getting it” and with “that’s all very well, but…” being the constant refrain?

This semester at NYU, I started working with EFF.org and realized that I cared very much about an open internet, free from both corporate interference and censorship. To an extent, getting involved in internet advocacy was an inevitability: I’ve always been interested in politics and communications, and I grew up the son of an electrical engineer and the younger brother of two computer programers. My involvement in advocacy and communications comes (quite usefully, it must be said) colored by a tech background.

In the US version of House of Cards, Michael Kern, the Secretary of State, is ousted from his post after it comes to light that he wrote an editorial in college where he called Israel’s occupation of Palestine illegal. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m only here on a temporary student visa, but I wonder sometimes if the advocacy work I’m doing will come back to haunt me in some way. Maybe self-doubt is part and parcel of college in the same way challenging convention is.

On my site, I keep a list of books I’m currently reading, and I’ve noticed a shift from fiction to non-fiction as I look around and devour everything in sight about activism. The more I read, the more I realize that the Internet has changed activism forever. In Digitally Enabled Social Activism: Activism in the Internet Age, the authors note at an early stage that the internet’s effect is two-fold: it both enables new activism and changes traditional activism.

One question I’m particularly interested in is how much different branches of advocacy are related. I don’t buy the argument that LGBTQ activists are the same as those who advocated for the rights of black Americans during the 1960s — there are more differences than “we’re advocating for different things”. Whatever about the rise of the internet, the social climate of the USA has changed in the last 50 years: we’ve gone from a president not mentioning AIDS in his entire first term to a president affirming in no uncertain terms that he believes same-sex couples should be able to get married. Advocacy is no longer subject to local or even national constraints.

Even though no two advocacy campaigns are the same, we can afford to be partially reductionist. Those of us who advocate for digital rights share something not insignificant with civil rights and LGBTQ activists. We have to be loud — nothing happens if we do or say nothing. We have to cut through the everyday noise and convince people that, whatever else is going on in their life, this is important. (This is arguably much harder on the internet, where over a million terabytes of data is produced a day.)

Then again, internet advocates differ from those who advocated through traditional channels because we’re still experimenting with our tools: is social media useful or just a waste of time?

When it comes to Facebook, I’ve noticed that the debate seems to be framed in a very one-dimensional way. Liking a page “in solidarity” with a certain group is a very weak form of activism, it’s true, but does that mean Facebook’s useless? Young people today get a huge amount of their news from the likes of Twitter and Facebook — everyone realizes that these apps are tools for communicating with this generation. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; the way to a teenager’s brain is through their phone.

Dan Savage realized this. In the preface to It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living, he talks about social networks (particularly YouTube) giving him access to teens’ attention spans in a way middle school officials never allowed him. A teenager who commits suicide, he says, can’t imagine a future that’s worth the current pain they’re experiencing. Savage released a video telling (and, with his husband by his side, showing) that it got better. Celebrities followed suit, and, a month later, Obama released his own “it gets better” video. This, as Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport noted in Digitally Enabled Social Change, is the internet is changing the face of traditional activism.

I find it interesting that the mediums we use to advocate nowadays are themselves coming under scrutiny. Undoubtably, my interest in traditional advocacy (women’s rights, LGBTQ equality) is informing and fueling my interest in internet advocacy. I don’t know if I’m a “good” activist, or if I’m doing the “right things”, but I can be comforted in the knowledge that I’m doing something.

Tommy Collison writes tommycollison.com and studies at New York University. He’s @tommycollison on Twitter.

Speaking Up was originally posted on Medium.com in Activism in the Digital Age.