A tweet about the “Rally for Joe Shanley.”
Suppose they gave a rebellion and nobody showed up.
That’s sometimes what happens in the new social media world of activism.
“When you don’t have the face-to-face aspect, you don’t feel obligated to go, you don’t feel inspired to go,” said Rachael Barillari, a campus columnist for student-run newspaper The Daily Orange, in an interview. She, some other college students and some communications experts say social media is discouraging students from actively participating.
Advocacy groups say social media, mainly Twitter and Facebook, are becoming effective ways to advocate and encourage young people to join a cause. Social media has played a role in the presidential election and showing support for victims of Hurricane Sandy, as well as the 2011 Egyptian uprising.
But the desire to rally is becoming “trapped in the world of social media,” wrote Barillari, a junior at Syracuse University, in a Feb. 4 column for The Daily Orange.
As an example, Barillari cited the student protest in January of the demotion of a campus safety officer. Online, the protestors had much presence: More than 800 Facebook users said they would attend the “Rally for Joe Shanley” and Twitter users tweeted “#SaveJoeSU.” But few actually showed up for the real rally.
Few students actually showed up to the “Rally for Joe Shanley,” despite much protest on social media sites.
Barillari said she expected social media would make student rallies more effective. Instead, it seems students feel like they don’t have to attend the actual rally if they participate online.
“On campus today, it seems we have relinquished our need to stand up for a cause,” Barillari wrote in her column. “This is not because reasons worth fighting for no longer exist, but because we have decided clicking a mouse is the equivalent of taking to the streets.”
In one scholarly look at the effects of social media, Yale University doctoral student Navid Hassanpour concluded in a 2011 report: “Social media can act against grass roots mobilization. They discourage face-to-face communication and mass presence in the streets.”
Too often, protestors become distracted online by other news. Instead of attending a rally, they may also prefer to be connected by their technology than in person, wrote Hassanpour.
William Ward, a professor of social media at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, disagrees.
Social media does provide an opportunity for people who could not otherwise participate to show support, he said. Even if a supporter does not show up for the actual event, he or she could still be participating virtually and spreading the cause online, Ward said.
“With social media, it’s a lot easier to connect with people who are like-minded,” Ward said.
Young people are the most likely users of social media, and so the most likely to be advocating a cause by the Internet. The main users of Twitter, a website that allows users to post 140-character messages, are typically 18 to 29 years old, according to a Feb. 14 report from independent The Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.
The skills young people developed to connect with friends on Twitter and Facebook can help generate support for a cause, said Ted Traver, regional campus supervisor for the New York Public Interest Research Group, or NYPIRG. Locally, the group lobbies for causes including higher education, environmental protection and voter registration with the support of students from SU and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
“We work with college students, thousands and thousands of college students, and they’ve showed us the effectiveness of social media,” Traver said.
Last spring, NYPIRG began encouraging supporters to tweet their political concerns at Gov. Andrew Cuomo using his Twitter handle @NYGovCuomo. Another event asked supporters to use Cuomo’s Facebook page to write to the governor against the controversial natural-gas extraction method called hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking.
NYPIRG rallied against hydrofracking before, but this was the first time through social media, Traver said. The response was so overwhelming that Cuomo’s page stopped allowing users to individually publish on the page, Traver said.
But while social media may be helping to spread NYPIRG’s message, Traver said the efforts to rally online are in addition, not instead of, traditional ways.
Ward, the social media professor at SU, encouraged young users to become educated about social media if they want to be effective advocates. To reach a greater, he said, Twitter users should consider using relevant hashtags. A hashtag is a word prefixed with a hash sign — or the # –used to categorize Tweets and follow trends of discussion on Twitter.
“Using Twitter and Facebook to connect with friends and family is very different than marketing a cause,” Ward said.
Citing October’s New York Marathon, Ward said social media is a tool that can help people come together for a cause. When the marathon was canceled due to Hurricane Sandy, runners in the area organized through social media to distribute food to high-rise apartment buildings. With the electricity out and elevators not working, runners marched up and down flights of stairs to deliver food.
Said Ward: “I would say people are turning out.”
(Dara McBride is a senior with dual majors in business management and newspaper journalism.)
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