Digital Leadership and Online Activism

Online activism and digital leadership are two things that a very important in such a digital and social media controlled world. The two are intertwined in the sense that you can practice good online activism which can lead to digital leadership. I think the possibility is there for people to actually create meaningful change from behind their computer screens, but it is a very tall task. I think that people get blinded by the fog of meaningless banter and all the garbage that is out there online, that the actual good that people are trying to do gets covered up.

Digital tools like groups or even publish on sites like Medium can be very beneficial towards these goals of online activism if they are used the right way. Something I took away from this weeks module was the hashtag activism. I neat and creative way to create hashtags to use on twitter or instagram and create challenges or ideas to bring about awareness of certain issues. In this weeks reading from Pinion, it talks about how some may see online activism as lazy or ineffective when compared to people going out and trying to spark change in public, physically. But it was interesting to read about the research that was done by the professor at The University of Pennsylvania showed how much easier and faster these acts of activism can be carried out on the online world. It could be faster than ever before, something that is relatively new in perspective, but once understood better can spark change and get the ball rolling on communicating it to others way quicker than via word of mouth.

I remember back to the ASL Ice Bucket challenge that was all over the internet a few years back. It took social media by storm and raised millions of dollars towards research into Lou Gehrigs Disease. I think it is difficult to get a giant trend like that to catch on, but when it does it is a great form of digital leadership as well as online activism.