By Mitchell Hall
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Last week, many Americans and media outlets responded to
the Orlando shooting with a shared, now-standardized routine: an expression of
outrage followed by a demand for politicians to take more decisive action that
goes beyond sending “thoughts and prayers.”
Much of the reaction I witnessed online and in the news
wasn’t surprising. The filibuster by Senate Democrats to push gun-control
legislation was to be expected and, although it was outrageous, I wasn’t
shocked to see so many reporters in the media, such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper,
find creative ways to blame the tragedy—committed by a possibly gay,
self-confessed ISIS-following, registered Democrat—on Christian Republicans.
I did find remarkable the number of my peers who posted
about the tragedy on social media. “Posted” is a generous word; rather, they hijacked the tragedy as a means to
highlight their social consciousness and demonstrate their moral superiority. I
couldn’t escape obnoxious, sanctimonious Facebook posts by my online friends,
most of them college students like myself, all of which had an air of “What
happened was awful, but hey, don’t forget about me. Look at how passionately
I’m condemning it!”
These types of responses aren’t just limited to devastating
national events. “Hashtag activism“ and “slacktivism”—wherein people give token
support for a cause in the form of crafting a hashtag, publishing a social
media post, or giving out a “like”—have become a hallmark of political
engagement in recent years, particularly among college students. The prevalence
of these self-indulgent sentiments prompted me to ask: when did political
activism become so selfish?
The Rise of Shame
Culture
This question requires considering the dramatic social
and cultural changes infecting campuses across the country. From student
tyranny at Mizzou and Yale to hysteria over Halloween costumes, building names,
and other “microaggressions,” American colleges have became cesspools for an
endless stream of grievances championed by student “activists.”
As New York Times
writer David Brooks notes, a new moral code built upon what’s known as “shame
culture” has accompanied this wave of campus chaos. Brooks explains how a shame
culture deviates from a guilt culture: “In a guilt culture you know you are
good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are
good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or
excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a
shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad.”
The ever-increasing dominance of social media networks,
which enable people to simultaneously display themselves and observe everyone
else, has facilitated this new moral system and instituted new, online behavior
patterns.
First, members of a group—socially conscious students,
let’s say—can post a thoughtful message or a link to an article that conveys
their support for a cause. The other members of the group then praise each
other for doing so, in the form of a “like” or a supportive comment, to
mutually affirm their positions in the in-group.
Next, members police or ostracize other individuals in
the online community who express different opinions. This provides an
additional vehicle for members of the group to reaffirm their status and build
their reputations. The social benefits conferred on these enforcers, meanwhile,
lead to an intense feeling of anxiety and hyper-vigilance among members of the
in-group. If they do not enjoy instant recognition, or receive the slightest
hint of criticism, they feel as if they’ve been gravely wronged, and react
accordingly.
To see what this culture looks like in reality, watch
Cooper’s aforementioned exchange with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi
didn’t accept his assertion that her past opposition to same-sex marriage made
her present concern for the LGBT community insincere and hypocritical. In
response, Cooper actually pointed to his policing of her Twitter account: “I
read your Twitter history for the last year, and I saw you tweeting about, you
know, National Dog Month and National Shelter Dog Appreciation Day or
Adopt-A-Shelter Dog Month. You know, it is Gay Pride Month, you’ve never even
tweeted about Gay Pride Month.”
It didn’t matter that Bondi had just explained how she
spent the morning fighting with a funeral home for overcharging family members
of the Orlando victims. Her Twitter feed is evidently the measure of her
commitment to their cause, and Cooper felt justified in shaming her simply due
to her exclusion from the in-group that actively tweets support for LGBT
Americans.
When Activism
Meets Narcissism
The development of this shame culture has not only
created a misguided moral system wherein actions are judged based on one’s
inclusion or exclusion from a certain group, but it has also rendered political
activism into much more of a selfish enterprise—as an opportunity for
individuals to promote themselves alongside a political issue.
Contrast today’s activism with that of the civil rights
era in the 1960s. These movements were characterized by hundreds of thousands
of students participating in sit-ins, boycotts, walkouts, and confrontations
with police. To be recognized as an activist for these causes, you couldn’t
just talk about how much you liked MLK, you had to get out there on the front
lines.
While student crusades today have also featured sit-ins,
boycotts, walkouts, and even squabbles with police, one’s physical presence is
no longer required to cement a place in the movement. Tweeting out a popular
article or publishing a Facebook essay about how much you care, all from the
comfort of your bedroom, conveys a person’s commitment without him actually
having to do anything meaningful.
Because of social media, you can now reap the social benefits associated with
being an activist without, well, actually being an activist.
Ironically, this slacktivism might do more to inhibit a
movement than help it. A 2014 study from the University of British Columbia
analyzes how socially observable token acts of support influence the likelihood
of further pro-social action. The study found that those who publicly expressed
online support for a cause were no more likely to provide more meaningful
contributions than someone who was just randomly asked to do so. This is
consistent with other studies that have shown that when people privately expend
effort for something, they’re more likely to contribute more meaningfully in
the future.
Many student “activists” post links and share statuses,
subsequently receive praise and recognition for doing so, and as a result
believe they’ve helped the cause. Or they’ve fulfilled their selfish desire for
this social approval, and thus they don’t feel compelled to support the cause
in more tangible ways. What results is a situation in which a movement looks like it’s amassed significant
support—and thus is treated as if it has—but in reality lacks substantive
support.
Let’s Restore
Standards for Action
This new shame culture and acceptance of online
slacktivism is dangerous for several reasons. For one, it unjustly bolsters
small movements spurred by tiny but vocal minorities—a trend that has caused
trouble for many colleges in particular.
In just one example, Dean Mary Spellman of Claremont
McKenna College—a school of 1,300—recently resigned after hundreds of social
media users expressed outrage over a photo of “racially insensitive” Halloween
costumes. What were “protests” like on campus? Two students went on a hunger
strike, 30 students of color wrote a letter to the administration, and a
relatively small group of fewer than 50 students staged a confrontation with
President Hiram Chodosh. About 5 percent of the student body actually
participated in the movement through tangible action; thus, it’s likely the
online pressure forced the resignation.
This phenomenon has also manifested in other ways, namely
in outrage culture. Take the recent controversy over Blake Lively’s Instagram
post as an example. She borrowed a line from Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” to
caption her photo, prompting some angry commentary by an ambiguous number of
social media users, and suddenly the media ran with the story that Lively had
incited a full-blown scandal. But there was no real outrage—no protesting outside movie theaters, no boycotting,
no action anywhere other than behind a computer screen.
It’s high time the media stopped confusing a loose collection
of angry tweets with a march on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s also time that we
individually stop legitimizing lazy online activism. Don’t incessantly praise
your Facebook friends for “raising awareness” with their new picture filter,
and don’t hail them as heroes after every impassioned status update. If we
continue accepting anything less than real action, then we could find ourselves
at the mercy of an online minority exercising their will over a silent, largely
offline majority.
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