In the past months, I wrote four blogposts related to new media and development. My blogposts encompassed topics like the Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-19 and censorship, the dehumanizing use of marginalized people on development organizations’ social media and the role of the digital ‘world’ in relation to displaced people and NGOs. Although these posts contain very different topics, they are all related to the new media, activism and development theme. In this final post, I will discuss my four posts, elaborate on how my posts are related to each other and how they relate to bigger new media, activism and development debates. I will also reflect on the process of writing the blog posts and what I learned from this assignment. For our blog, we decided to find sub-themes within new media, activism and development. Therefore, our blog posts mainly focused on both activism and slacktivism, and how new media is used, but also manipulated. Therefore, in my blogposts I also mainly focused on these specific themes.
New media is deeply ingrained into our lives. It is therefore no surprise that it also plays a big role in activism and the development sector. New media or new ICT’s (Information and Communication Technologies) play a role in development organizations in the following manner: the use of ICTs in development is called ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). ICT4D means that “technology is used to help deliver on the international development agenda” (Heeks, 2017, p. 18). It is therefore important to understand how new media can be used and what the outcomes from its use may be. New media have changed the way we interact with each other, and the speed in which this interaction takes place. Overall, new media can have positive influences on activism and development, and the reach and speed of the Internet contribute to this. However, when not used in the right manner, and without anticipating the outcomes, it can have negative consequences. In my posts, I mainly focused on this negative or difficult side of ICT4D in relation to activism and development organizations. I have done this to show that there is still work to be done in order to fully benefit from new media, but that once the way in which new media should be used is understood, it can be very beneficial to organizations.
Slacktivism
In my first post, I talked about a form of activism: slacktivism. In ‘Slacktivism: Protests Gone Viral’, I discussed slacktivism in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement. ““Slacktivism” or “clicktivism,” [are] terms that suggest easy action requiring little effort or commitment” (Tufekci, 2017, p.26). Slacktivism raises questions about whether online engagement can lead to offline action and the desired goal (Poell and van Dijck, 2018) of the movement, or whether it only leads to a brief wave of attention without the public engaging any further. This post highlighted how the internet and activism, or networked protests, as Tufekci (2017) calls, them are intertwined, and how important it is to study these in relation to each other. It also shows the importance for organizations and movements to understand their relationship to the online world and what impact the online world can have on them and their cause. As Tufekci (2017) said:
“The internet similarly allows networked movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities that could prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the ability to respond to what comes next” (p. 12-13).
Next to understanding the possible outcomes of the use of new media and the impact it can have, it is also crucial to place online impact in a context. Tweeting about a topic in a repressive country is a very brave act and can then be very powerful (Tufekci, 2017).
Censorship
In my second post, ‘The three C’s: Corona, Conspiracy & Censorship’, I looked at this in the light of misinformation and censorship, and evaluated what the impact of censorship can be. Censorship is a very difficult topic. Tufekci (2017) pointed out: “What determines the kind of content that is allowed on platforms and the kind that is removed, censored, or suppressed? There is no simple answer.” (p. 146). Because social media websites can determine what they do and do not censor, it can make them politically powerful, since they can decide what information is being spread and what information is not (Tufekci, 2017). But censorship does not only make social media platforms powerful, but also governments:
“The internet’s relatively chaotic nature, with too much information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable” (p. 29).
This censorship then limits online activism, for example in China, where the government actively blocks social media, and bloggers have to go to prison (Tufekci, 2017). For movements and organizations, it is then important to understand censorship and look for ways to work with this censorship, as new media can pose a great threat to oppressive regimes (Tufekci, 2017).
The Impact of the Digital
In my third post, ‘Spectacularizing Disasters as a Social Media Strategy’, I looked at a whole different side of the use of new media, but also again pointed out the pitfalls for development organizations. As development organizations are trying to include new media, they should be very careful not to generate (or sustain) the North – South dichotomy. As I pointed out in my post, many organizations still use photos of marginalized people and children on their social media in order to gain an audience. This however, leads to a politics of pity, which relies on two distinctions: the distinction between those we suffer and those who don’t, and the unlucky (the sufferer) vs. the lucky (the non-sufferer), and often the lucky ones are Westerners. “Pity, here, is not the natural sentiment of human empathy but, rather, an historically specific and politically constituted principle for relating spectator and sufferer, with the former safely removed from the unfortunate condition of the latter” (Chouliaraki, 2004, p. 190). As already mentioned before, development organizations should be more aware of the impact of ICT4D. This is called Digital for Development: “the conscious design and application of digital tools explicitly for development outcomes and impact” (Roberts, 2019). The outcomes of digital development actions should not dehumanize the global South. Development organizations should instead look for more sustainable ways to create long-lasting engagement and dignify the marginalized.
My last post did also partially focus on the negative outcomes of the digital world, but also focused on how NGOs can make use of the digital to support marginalized people. It also showed that it is important to realize that the use of new media is very widespread, and how displaced people may benefit from it. For development organizations, it is then important to look at how they can use this to benefit from, to ‘develop’, and instigate social change.
“This datafication of social interaction, exercise, consumption, political preferences and so many other aspects of social and economic life have profound consequences for international development” (Roberts, 2019).
Roberts (2019) calls this ‘development in a digital world’. This term implies the interconnectivity of the digital and development and showcases how important it is to understand this interconnectivity in order for organizations to benefit from it. As with the case with refugees fleeing to Europe, organizations should use the opportunity to ‘meet’ with refugees in the digital space in order to support them. But in order to do so, this interconnectivity needs to be fully understood.
Acknowledging the Digital
I believe the possibilities with new media are endless and can create a whole new side to activism and development. This can however only happen when the new ICTs are used in the right manner. As I have shown in my posts, there are many pitfalls related to the use of new media in activism and development that should be taken into account. As Tufekci (2017) said, it is crucial to understand what the outcomes of the use of new media are for an organization, in order to use the new media in a beneficial way. I believe that this is still a challenge for organizations and something that should be taken more seriously. By now, in 2020, we should move away from digital dualism. Digital dualism is the simplification of the understanding of how people relate to the internet and how people’s relations with the internet affect social movements – the premise that the online world is less significant or real than the offline world (Tufekci, 2017). The online and the offline world are by now so interconnected that it is not possible to talk about one without taking the other into account. The digital, online world plays a huge role in our lives and in order for organizations to make a change in the offline world, they also have to be present in the right manner in the online world. I believe that this is still a big challenge for development organizations, but I also believe that once they understand how they can use new media in the right manner, their impact will increase immensely. As Roberts (2019) said, development organizations have to start realizing and acknowledging that they have to look at development in a digital world, and that this digital world is as important as the offline world.
Personal Reflection
In the last part of this post, I will elaborate on the process of writing my blog posts, my learning outcomes, and difficulties I experienced throughout the process. Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment. Creating a blog and writing posts was completely new to me, and I definitely learned a lot. Designing the blog and playing around with WordPress was something I enjoyed very much. Although I do enjoy writing, before this assignment, I had only written academic essays. Therefore, I had to get used to this quicker and less academic way of writing. I found it very nice to be able to select topics that I am interested in and turn these into blogposts. Writing in this way, allows you to be more creative than in academic essays, because you can, for example, add more visual information. I also really enjoyed reading posts from my group members and other blogs, and discussing topics in the comments. What I found difficult was the frequency of the posts. I underestimated how much time would go into writing a post and because of that, I could not follow the posting schedule we created as a group. I also think that because my posts would be available for everyone to read, I wanted my posts to be perfect and was afraid to post something that would contain mistakes. The topics of my posts are topics that I engage with and think about often, and it was very enjoyable to look even more into them, find new connections and angles, and discuss with other people. I think that blogging is a very valuable way of sharing and engaging with current debates, because it is more accessible than academic articles and the threshold of actually writing something, and posting it is much lower.
Word count: 1936
References
Chouliaraki, L. (2004). Watching 11 September: The Politics of Pity. Discourse & Society, 15(2-3), 185-198. doi:10.1177/0957926504041016
Heeks, R. (2017). Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). Abingdon: Routledge.
Poell, T. & van Dijck, J. (2018). Social Media and New Protest Movements. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick & T. Poell (Eds.), SAGE Handbook of Social Media (pp. 546-561). London: Sage.
Roberts, T. (2019, August 9). Digital Development: What’s in a name? Retrieved from http://www.appropriatingtechnology.org/?q=node/302
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas-The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale University Press.
