Samuel here.
Toronto is basically a billion degrees and absurdly sunny today, and residence services has yet to put a screen in my window, so for the first time since September I can lean out my 8th floor window with a mug of coffee and enjoy a couple hundred pages of Kissinger (my favorite!). So you'll understand if I have trouble getting convincingly worked up about anything right now. I have a nice angry post ready to upload, but today I wanted to talk to you about something super-contemporary while everyone's still talking about it. Plus, if I uploaded a post that I had already written, I would be writing my history essay right now instead of writing this post. And what a waste of time that would be.
So it turns out that I'm psychic. I can make unerring predictions about the contents of other peoples' Facebook News Feeds. Don't believe me? Watch this: if you have a Facebook account, you will have these three statuses on it, and they'll be in this order chronologically:
- A link to this video, followed by something like “Please watch all of this or else you eat puppies” (NOTE: this isn't like my other posts. You don't have to watch this to understand what I'm talking about. PLEASE don't think that you have to watch this to know what I'm talking about.)
- A status like “slacktivism is actually the Holocaust I'm not even joking” (slacktivism is the derisive term generally applied to those who spread the news of social issues online and are content to leave their involvement in the issue to that)
- A status where someone linked to this tumblr, saying something like “I'm not yet coming out completely not in favor of Invisible Children per se, I'm just saying that maybe there's something a little bit less than ideal going on with this organization and maybe some healthy skepticism shouldn't be avoided PLEASE DON'T HATE ME.”
I have absolutely no interest in writing about whether or not Invisible Children is legit. I don't want to tell you whether you should support the (bizarrely named, bizarrely branded) Kony 2012 campaign. I watched some of the video, I read the tumblr post, and I've sort of made up my mind. You probably should too. I'm perfectly happy to let you make up your minds about statuses 1) and 3). What I want to talk about is the dickheads responsible for status 2).
I'll try to put the best face on these complaints that I can. One of the main reasons that I'm doing this blog is that I like to break these things down in a way that most people don't seem to; I think that no argument is worth examining until you have stated it syllogistically with all meaningful premises stated explicitly. And no one ever writes or speaks in syllogisms when they're casually arguing. And that leads to really shitty arguments that go absolutely nowhere. If you state a conclusion and I take issue with it, and we go back and forth about increasingly unrelated ideas for 15 posts, then probably at some point you will say something blatantly wrong. Then I can fixate on that and ignore your conclusion entirely, while remaining smug in the idea that I have won the argument and that your conclusion must be wrong. I sincerely believe that this is why no one ever changes their minds about anything. So let's not make that mistake here!
The best argument I can think of against slacktivism proceeds, quite roughly, as follows (NOTE: This argument applies only in situations where this actually is the best argument I can think of. For example, for the Kony 2012 video, there is substantial reason to believe that it's riddled with errors, and insubstantial reason to believe that it's intentionally misleading. So this argument only applies to when people complain about factual videos on important issues being shared with good intentions. Thanks to Isuri and Sophie for pointing out the need for this qualification) :
Premise 1: Meaningful social change is effected when many people do something to measurably advance a social cause.
Premise 2: Sharing a video on Facebook does not measurably advance any cause, nor does it lead to any cause being measurably advanced.
Premise 3: People who share a video on Facebook often think that they have done something to measurably advance a social cause.
Premise 4: People only work to advance a social cause if they feel they have not already done something for that cause.
Conclusion: From premises 1) and 2): Sharing videos on Facebook never constitutes social change. From premises 3) and 4): Sharing videos on Facebook actively discourages social change. Allowing that social change is desirable, then sharing videos on Facebook about social issues is wrong.
If you think I have misstated the issue, or stated a weaker version of the argument than you would like, please leave a comment telling me that I am a tool.
Here are my problems with the progression above:
Premise 1) is just my personal definition of social change, so naturally I don't have a problem with it.
Premise 2) seems too counter-intuitive for me to be comfortable with it. The usual response to this is that “it raises awareness”, which I think is a very valuable point: my politics and outlook are of course heavily shaped by what people who were close to me told me when I was young. I am certain that videos and images in the classroom and on television played a major role in forging my present worldview. I wouldn't exactly say that I have meaningfully and measurably advanced any worthy causes yet, but I certainly hope to in the next few decades. If I hadn't been exposed to the right things, who knows if I would be studying political science? It seems like a very, very weak premise to take that my exposure to videos like the Kony one played a negligible role in my social development. Very weak.
Premise 3) and premise 4) again are deeply unsatisfying, for the same reason: why do you think that? How do you know that's true? Before we actively discourage people from sharing videos, shouldn't we make sure that we're right that it decreases the action that people will actually take? I bet you it won't. I don't tend to share videos like this one, but one the very rare occasions that I have, I never sat back and thought to myself “well, I win. Suck it, Global Warming.” You could respond that I thought this on a subconscious level, but your argument is just getting more and more tenuous.
We get so caught up in these layers and layers of increasingly fragile justification that we forget that we can actually measure things. If you are against slacktivism, I want at least some reason to believe that your premises are true. Or present better ones to me. Meanwhile, I'm going with the intuitive assumption that the more people who know about a bad thing, the better. Even if it seems unpreventable, I can't think of a better way to figure out how to prevent it than to ask a whole ton of people. That's the only way that anything ever gets done.
But here's the part that really bothers me: I have a lot of trouble believing that anyone actually agrees with the argument that I laid out above. In fact, I submit to you that people who complain about slacktivists are complaining only because they hate to see other people doing something that makes them feel good. They aren't really accomplishing anything by sharing the video, and for some reason we believe that it makes them feel better about themselves, so we set out to take them down a notch. It's the same impulse that makes us derisively call scantily clad women “slutty”; we're too inhibited to do it, for whatever reason, so we hate to see other people do it. It's a petty, mean, absurd thing to do. Stop.
P.S. Simon and I will be ideally geographically located this weekend to bring you another cooperative post. So watch for that.
P.P.S. My mother just started a blog. If you like books, you should check it out. She's a writer, so she actually knows what she's talking about, which will be a welcome change from this blog. Anyways, by promoting it here, I can only assume that I have officially re-payed her for 18 years of food and love and stuff. You're welcome, mom!
"She's a writer, so she actually knows what she's talking about, which will be a welcome change from this blog."
ReplyDeleteouch some of us who write for the blog are actually good
I was going to say "except Ian, of course", but it messed with the flow
DeleteBut seriously, this is a good post and very, very quotable (I posted some to my tumblr).
DeleteAlso, by complaining about slacktivism, aren't people who are against slacktivism engaging in slacktivism themselves?
Excellent.
DeleteAnd yeah, that's why I named it Anti-Anti-Slacktivism Slacktivism. I was being a slacktivists by complaining about the slacktivists who complain about slacktivists.
slacktivist*
DeleteWhy is it so horrendously difficult to edit comments in this interface?
Contrary to what any memes might want to believe, every political activist, no matter who they were, at one point had only thirty minutes worth of information on their cause.
ReplyDeletePhilippe here.
DeleteFor some bizarre reason, that never occurred to me before.
But it's totally true, at least for people who crusade against things that didn't happen to them personally.
I don't necessarily mind slacktivism in and of itself, but to me, a lot of this is an indication of rampant [youth] ignorance. My initial reaction at a lot of this Kony stuff is [unfairly] disgust, but it's not that people are taking a stand about some arbitrary moral decision they want to publicise, it's that most of these people know nothing about Uganda, nothing about western/NATO members' foreign policy, nothing about the AU and UN, nothing about Museveni, nothing about Idi Amin, and nothing about Subsaharan Africa in general.
ReplyDeleteWe live in a complicated world, and there's immeasurable piles of stuff to learn, and I acknowledge that. We are all ignorant in our own way, because its absurd to expect people to have a basic understanding of all the things they should theoretically know. Having said this, the level of caring people possess is roughly between the time it takes to reblog some facebook video and complain about injustice to their newsfeed [or canvass me in public] and the time it takes to actually read about something for ten goddamn minutes.
On a vaguely related note, Niki Ashton's supporters give me the same vibe, as do Democrats for Santorum, /r/atheism, and a variety of other things that I've probably bitched about in the past.
I can get behind that, if there really are people who think that they have done enough just by reposting the video. But that's not generally the sense that I get; I think that, in general, people do care more than just enough to repost the video, but don't know what else to do. What if I really, really wanted to get rid of Kony right now? I wouldn't have the foggiest idea how. It seems to me that these things die out not because people are uncaring or lazy but because there simply aren't ways, at least not obvious ones, to effect most of the social change that we want to effect.
DeleteSo I still think that sharing the videos can only be a good thing. And I think that your complaints are valid and ought to be heard.
One thing that I wanted to work in, but didn't manage to (length, as always, prevented me), was a basic risk/reward assessment: if we discard the idea that sharing the videos makes people less likely to act, then sharing a video *cannot be a bad thing*. And if we can agree that it at least in the long term helps to shape our awareness that we live awesome lives and others do not, then that can only be good.
DeleteIsuri and Sophie here. Firstly, we'd like to say that we're really enjoying reading this blog, it's refreshing to read an in-depth-ish look at issues that are so often represented by single images or statuses on our newsfeeds. Now onto the issue at hand.
ReplyDeleteWhat we find problematic about this post is that it is based on the assumption that any information that is shared in this way is necessarily going to be factual, and this is simply not the case.
The most important aspect of social activism is understanding the issue you wish to address. The problem with “slacktivism” is that you are personally endorsing something often with no time in between being exposed to the issue and passing on the information. This means that the “slacktivist” does not usually have more than one source of information until they've already contributed to spreading that source. The Kony 2012 video is a really good example of this; the video was reblogged or shared before most people looked into other sources. There is a backlash right now against this sort of thoughtless propagation in all of the articles and blog posts that are currently being shared, mostly examining Invisible Children's legitimacy as well as the manner in which the facts of the issue, as well as its potential solution, were presented in the video. You need to take the time to investigate other sources and evaluate all of them critically. It is true that any social activist only had thirty minutes worth of information at one time in their careers as activists, but they didn't stop with only those thirty minutes, and that is how they were able to move forward and act.
Unless you are careful to investigate the methods and the purpose, you are in danger of supporting a cause that you don't necessarily agree with, as well as contributing to the spread of misinformation. We feel that this is the most frightening aspect of the Kony 2012 campaign's growth in the past 48 hours. Yes, what Kony is doing is terrible and awful and should not be allowed to continue, and of course children (or anyone for that matter) should not be forced into being soldiers or sex slaves. But the truth, as a wise man once said, resists simplicity, and we have to be careful not to get caught up in the mob mentality that demonizes one individual instead of addressing the entire issue and allows us to see ourselves as the Western Saviours.
Hello, Isuri and Sophie!
DeleteYou're absolutely right. I left that assumption implicit and I should not have. I will add a disclaimer right now.
My disclaimer will make it so that the post only addresses when people share accurate information. Why would I not talk about the spreading of misinformation? Because I think that we can all agree that that's a bad thing to do. The argument against it --- which, you're absolutely right, is the argument against the Kony 2012 video --- exists entirely independent of the arguments against slacktivism that bother me.
But yeah, you're totally right. I really should have made that clear in the first place, and that was a pretty big assumption for me to overlook. Thanks!
There. Ctrl+f your names and you'll find it. Tell me if that answers your concern.
DeleteI like turtles.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe marketing campaign is right about a few things:
ReplyDeleteJoseph Kony abducts children and forces them into his army
An arrest warrant has been issued for Joseph Kony by the ICC
Joseph Kony is a very evil man, and is responsible for many deaths
Joseph Kony has operated in Uganda
That is where the hard, undeniable facts end.
This entire campaign is based around misinformation. it “manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” (American foreign affairs) It is a gross oversimplification of the issue that is Kony.
If we were to send a military intervention to Uganda, it would only result in another retaliative slaughter, as it has when AFRICOM has tried to capture or kill Kony before. While the usefulness of which have been debated, Kony has negotiated in peace talks before, even though they have fallen through. But attacking Kony would just result in the killing of children and other civilians, even more so than Iraq and Afghanistan (go-to examples), and more on the level of the Vietnam conflict.
Invisible children inc.'s strategy is to simply go in there with the military and try it again, on a large scale, with more people aware of it. That is not how you will solve the problem.
And even Invisible Children inc.'s finances seem to be a bit skewed. Most of it is spent on awareness, transportation, and film making, compared to other charitable organizations. That isn't how these companies should work, because just centring your company on 'awareness' is unprofessional, and usually just dishonest.
And the rhetoric that "Something is better than nothing" is based on the idea that Ugandans have nothing, white people have most resources, and we should help all those people who don't have anything. Therefore, it makes sense that anything we do to these people will make them better. This is flawed logic, as not all Ugandan women can be described as "rape victims" and not all Ugandan children can be described as "abducted". Therefore, something isn't necessarily better than nothing. In fact, it can be even worse.
Just my opinion.
PS this was copied from a facebook post, so it's a bit out of context, but I read the blog post up there, so it's okay
PPS I accidentally deleted this post, way to go me.
Philippe here.
ReplyDeleteThis is quite an impressive meme, it's amazing how much it seems to have proliferated.
I think I have a better argument against slacktivism.
1. Slacktivism gives its participants a sense of pride and moral superiority.
2. This sense of pride and moral superiority is not proportional to or justified by the action that inspires it.
3. Unwarranted pride is extremely annoying.
____________________________________________
4. Slacktivism is extremely annoying.
Plus it fits well into negative stereotypes of students, which makes it easier to slag.
This complaint would make sense if someone actually exhibitied moral superiority as a result of sharing a video. But I don't think that actually happens. Like I said, I don't think anyone actually thinks "I win" after sharing a video about a social issue. That's entirely the fabrication of people who already wanted to whine about something.
DeleteThat's possible.
DeleteTruth is, I don't think I've ever encountered an anti-slacktivist. And I've seen little real slacktivism.
Nonetheless, I have plenty of theories and explanations. Because I'm Philippe.