Slacktivism (noun): actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement, for example signing an online petition or joining a campaign group on social media; blend of "slacker" and "activism"
The Oxford Dictionaries define slacktivism and clicktivism as essentially the same word, but clicktivism is often considered a subcategory of slacktivism that limits the relevant actions to just mouse-clicking, such as simply opening certain sites or liking and sharing posts. Facebook users are all too familiar with the infamous "1 like = 1 prayer" posts, which are picture posts accompanied by one-sentence descriptions, grossly overgeneralizing an issue, and the phrase "1 like = 1 prayer." In its simplicity, these posts are often most effective (if effective at all) in drawing shock and pity rather than sympathy or any deeper, lasting sentiment. Images mocking this trend like the one below have become very popular.
Aside from the obvious facts that a prayer can be made without liking a post and a like on a Facebook post will not actually change the situation pictured, these kinds of photos are a prime example of the negative side of slacktivism. In this age of social media, the politically engaged question more and more often whether
slacktivism/clicktivism a) has any effect at all, b) positively impacts movements, or
c) actually hurts activism.
Micah White, co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, wrote a piece featured in The Guardian called "Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism." Clearly, White is in the (c) category. He compares clicktivism to the marketing of everyday products, demeaning the importance and profundity of political activism by packaging it into palatable portions.
Exchanging the substance of activism for reformist platitudes that do well in market tests, clicktivists damage every genuine political movement they touch. In expanding their tactics into formerly untrammelled political scenes and niche identities, they unfairly compete with legitimate local organisations who represent an authentic voice of their communities. They are the Wal-Mart of activism: leveraging economies of scale, they colonise emergent political identities and silence underfunded radical voices.
Essentially, slacktivism is activism meets capitalism, using advertising knowledge to maximize and prioritize participation and reach over depth and complexity of issues. The "mainstreaming" of political movements has been especially contentious recently, especially with feminism. This could be its own post, so I will save that conversation for another time. The important thing to note here is that while getting the word out about different political issues and movements is a necessary part of progress and democracy, there comes a point where just trying to spread awareness in a thin, blanketing manner compromises content. A single hashtag, petition, or video simply cannot comprehensively discuss the multitude of contributing factors and outcomes of a huge, complex, long-standing problem, and as White says, the millions of posts that are following a trend can drown out the "radical" and marginalized voices social media is supposed to support.
As social media becomes a greater part of political activism, more people have been willing to come forward about the various drawbacks of slacktivism and, even more specifically, hashtag activism, or the use of hashtags to represent and support certain political movements. In this Washington Post article detailing the history of hashtag activism is a response to #BringBackOurGirls from 2014. Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole tweeted about the gross simplification of issues hashtag activism proliferates: “Much as we might wish this to be a single issue with a clear solution, it isn’t, and it cannot be. It never was. Boko Haram killed more human beings yesterday than the total number of girls they kidnapped three weeks ago. Horrifying, and unhashtagable.” Indeed, the way issues are presented on social media are rarely comprehensive, and from my own Millennial perspective, most people buy into hashtag movements because they are trendy and not because they are truly invested in the topics.
However, perhaps this is too much of an elitist or purist approach. The main benefit of slacktivism is, after all, its laziness, convenience, approachability. Of course, it is not the hardcore, grassroots, tangible movement that politically involved people would prefer, but don’t things begin with awareness?
The Washington Post piece goes on to discuss other hashtag movements and points out two important differences in successful hashtags: effectiveness of awareness in that particular issue and specific demands from the movement. The article uses #StandwithPP as a good example of this. When Planned Parenthood was losing funding in 2012, the hashtag gave a voice to those who had personally benefited from their services, increased awareness, snagged mainstream media attention, and eventually restored funding. Meanwhile, all the notorious #Kony2012 seemed to do was tout Western interventionism, and yes,
Kony is still at large.
In regards to successful slacktivism, we cannot ignore the enormous imapct things like sharing videos, retrweeting, and hashtags did for some of the biggest movements of this century like Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter. And while experts still disagree about whether or not social media involvement actually leads to more substantial engagement in the future (see here, here, and here), there is no denying that slacktivism can at least raise awareness. Now that we've defined the terms and seen slacktivism at work, the job of political activists in this Internet age is to encourage people to get legitimately invested in issues and look for sustainable solutions. Slacktivism's pull is in its convenience and low level of commitment, but the initial exposure that activism brings should be inspiring people to do more, not less.
One of the easiest ways for the average person to keep up with the movements and milestones of our world is to tune in to, not even necessarily the news, but the realm of public intellectuals. Depending on who is asked, the public intellectual can have slightly varying job descriptions, but the idea is that the public intellectual is someone who is well-versed in a field and brings concerns of that field to the general public. "Because they had to eat," public intellectuals are often journalists or academics who use their careers to pursue their critical analyses and not the other way around.
Elizabeth Plank is a textbook 21st century public intellectual. Education: she attended McGill University, at which she was on the Dean Honor List, and received her master's degree from the London School of Economics in social policy with specialities in behavioral science and gender studies. Academia: through an exchange program, she worked briefly at the University of Copenhagen, and after finishing her studies at the London School of Economics, she also held positions there as a research assistant and behavioral science consultant. Career: Plank works in various areas of media and communication, having held positions from editor to journalist to web show host. Since her area of expertise is policy in relation to behavior and gender issues, Plank's content usually focuses on "millennial perspective on politics, women's issues, and reproductive rights."
The problem with public intellectuals, of course, is that they are not all-knowing or unbiased, and blindly following and agreeing with them is counterintuitive to the point of their work. How do we then keep the spirit of public intellectuals alive without falling into this Kantian idea of guardians of enlightenment who lead the sheep? Stephen Mack offers an answer:
...It needs to begin with a shift from "categories and class" to "function." That is, our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is – and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.
So, let us stray for a moment from Plank's credentials and actually step backward to a key question: what is the use of a public intellectual? One New York Times article points out the important distinction that a public intellectual is not just an academic or a journalist. Another article emphasizes that the true public intellectual is somewhat of an "outsider" and believes "reason and truth could triumph universally through the transformation of public opinion." Stephen Mack's article mentioned earlier also notes that the public intellectual should capture some kind of "anxiety." In short, I would assess that the use of the public intellectual is in their hybrid perspective of expert and critic, as someone who can keep their audience grounded and informed but also can inspire engagement, questioning, maybe even flat-out controversy.
This leads me to the early work of Elizabeth Plank. Plank could have gone into pure policy or journalism, but she chose to write for the Huffington Post, a site which produces a mix of news and blog content. Her work has also revolved around progressivism, sexism, and how politics and culture interlock. A young, female, budding writer fixated on such issues working for a liberal, online source is certainly not the picture of the establishment, and from the beginning, Plank has used her approachable writing style and obligatory action plug to get the average person thinking about what gender inequality looks like in everyday life. Her first article was about the Amateur International Boxing Association requiring female boxers to wear skirts. In a slightly casual but still fluid manner, Plank describes why forcing female athletes to don skirts is such a problem (hint: skirts have nothing to do with boxing). The most notable part of this article is that she includes a link to a petition against the proposed skirt rule, urging readers to voice their disapproval of this sexist idea. In another article under the Huffington Post, Plank writes a comprehensive piece about the wage gap between white men and women of different races and ethnicities. At the end of her post, she includes the hashtag #WithoutTheWageGapIWould, encouraging her audience to express their own difficulties with the wage gap, and then lists things employers and employees can do about the gap.
I will address exactly how Plank persuades her audience later in this post, but here, I would like to note the crucial part of Plank's content that not only qualifies her as a public intellectual but also makes her an exceedingly good one - Plank consistently prompts people to act on the issues she discusses. She is not a passive commentator, she is not a curious reporter, she is, at the core, an activist. She motivates people to bring about the change they want to see, and that's what sets her apart from mere "laptop warriors."
Plank built the bulk of her career through Mic.com, at which she has worked for four years now. In 2015, two years after she started at Mic, she was placed in Forbes' legendary "30 Under 30" list for her engaging content and for doubling site traffic. Her work has often "gone viral," and she is responsible for social media hashtag movements like #AllMenCan,
which, similarly to #WithoutTheWageGapIWould, asks her audience to get involved in the discussion and contribute their views on how they and others can create a more equal world. How does Plank manage to regularly snag the attention of the notoriously fickle people of the Internet?
From the start of Plank's public intellectual streak, she has been careful to stay away from overly flowery language, jargon, or expecting her audience to know everything about the issues prior to viewing her content. She commits to the "translation" of deeply rooted controversies for the average citizen, even now, despite the fact she is a more widely recognized figure. In 2016, Plank wrote an article on the Orlando shooting, in which she cited several key pieces of legislation necessary for contextualizing her article while also sprinkling the post with more colloquial terms and humor. For instance, she explains the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act plainly and solemnly, while a few paragraphs before, she writes, "North Carolina has literally politicized where transgender and gender nonconforming people can pee." Plank is able to hit at the hard stuff and also make it relatively easy to digest, and this approach to "reason and truth to transform public opinion" has been, evidently, enormously successful.
By the time she started working at Vox just about a year ago, Plank had started to use humor and social media more and more. In the first installment of her award-winning Vox 2016ish video series, which is also posted on Youtube, Plank interviews Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, interjecting facts, bystander commentaries, and serious questions with her now characteristic humor: endearingly dorky behavior, meaningful pauses and delivery for emphasis, and sarcasm. In a video on Vox's Facebook from three weeks ago, Plank hilariously engages with the discussion of our new Cabinet in a satirical advertisement. In an ironically cheery tone, the video examines the disturbingly discriminatory platforms of newly appointed members. Plank masterfully uses her humor to highlight how ridiculous and actually upsetting she finds the state of affairs in America today, and with thousands of likes and hundreds of shares, she is clearly striking a chord with the online community.
There is also a huge advantage to using Twitter hashtags (which can get heinous, I know). Plank understands that asking her readers and viewers to contribute their own perspectives can have an entirely different effect on people. While people who dislike Plank may disagree with her purely on the grounds that they don't like her or her humor or her subject matter or whatever it may be, seeing people you know and care about post their everyday experiences can really change your opinion. I revisited the wage gap Twitter hashtag, and here are a few of the many testimonies. #WithoutTheWageGapIWould:
Taking issues as big and historically tense as sexism and framing them in this kind of everyday way, a form of content translation in itself, demonstrates very easily to people the impact and injury certain groups may feel, how discrepancies in treatment influence policy, and how policy cycles back to inform our culture.
In some of the articles mentioned previously, critics of the public intellectual seem to condemn those who try to uphold the title today via the Internet. Things like "clicktivism," or online activism, are a huge point of contention with the left, and despite the indisputable popularity and power of it, social media is often seen as unhealthy, even a menace to society. But Elizabeth Plank embraces the power of the Internet. She engages extensively through her online writings and on social media platforms, making her content more accessible to her young, progressive audience. She has spread her discussions on sexism and related policy matters, explained the complexities of these issues, and most importantly, incorporated ways for her readers to stay educated, get talking, and empower themselves.
So, once again: how do we then keep the spirit of public intellectuals alive without falling into this Kantian idea of guardians of enlightenment who lead the sheep? The key to success that Plank has demonstrated in her incredible growth in just five short years is the incorporation of audience participation. No one wants to just hear facts, no one wants to just hear opinion. What people want is for them to feel heard, for their issues to be addressed, for them to be able to do something. And on that, Elizabeth Plank delivers.
