Cyberactivism -
Linking our personal values and experiences to our digital communities

Over the last few years, you’ve probably come across monthly posts all over different social media platforms supporting and shedding light on all kinds of awarenesses and causes that speak close to users’ hearts. This is called “cyberactivism” and Mahoney and Tang (2017) define in their book Strategic Social Media – From Marketing to Social Change that we often see these posts because they represent values that have affected our human experience in a positive or negative way. Many times, people feel the desire to support these causes to join a community or to just educate their followers about certain problems that are present in our world.

October in particular, social media platforms, sports teams, and even your local grocery store are flooded with pink ribbons, pink profile pictures, etc all for the support of breast cancer awareness month. It’s a beautiful thing really, people coming together to support a detrimental medical condition that has taken so many lives of people close to us. The cyberactivism surrounding breast cancer saw a HUGE boom in 2010.

Women on Facebook received a private message where it asked them to change their status update to a singular color that correlated with the bra color they were currently wearing. The goal of this message was to simply confuse men and raise awareness for breast cancer. This message circulated like wildfire and tons of users updated their status to their bra color without hesitation.

To escalate things even further, more private Facebook memes circulated throughout the years, and one even asked women to update their status to the response of the question of “ Where do you like your purse”. They were told to respond with something like “I like it in the car” or “I like it on the bed” to confuse men even more and you guessed it…to raise awareness for breast cancer! While sexualizing advocacy for breast cancer seems a bit bizarre to some it worked to engage hundreds of thousands of users to advocate for awareness about breast cancer.

While the virality of these meme update status posts are humorous and definitely brings attention to a very important cause, it begs the questions of how cyberactivism works and what is its overall impact towards the cause.

How It Works

Social media’s ability to create unique communities is one of the foundational reasons why cyberactivism works. Khoro’s blog post on social media and how it creates communities really sums up this concept brilliantly. They explain that the deeper users commit to exploring and defining their community, the more shared purpose is exposed. In turn, this leads to better chances that other members will reveal personal stories. Illia (2002) explains in her analyses on cyberactivism In the journal of public affairs that shared experiences and similar values trigger more engaging participation and develop meaningful relationships with other users online. The article by Illia (2002) further justifies that it is those shared experiences combined with information diffusion that enables users to find purpose to support causes which explains why this meme went viral.

Is Cyberactivism Effective Towards The Cause?

Well…yes and no…

We can all agree that funny posts from our friends supporting a cause definitely sparks interest in the topic. Some even argue that in the case of this Facebook meme sexualizing the support of breast cancer was a bit unnecessary.

However, when it comes to how effective it is in financial support to this type of cancer, the Susan G. Koman institution found that they could not correlate the increased interest and donations in 2010 to these posts directly (Mahoney and Tang, 2017).

For this case in particular, simply posting these status updates has a call to action that is missing. I believe it could have been more effective if there was a link to donate, volunteer, and or even sign up for a breast cancer awareness event. And that’s where cyberactivism is a bit spotty.

Cyberactivism does a great job at diffusing information to the masses but without an apparent call to action, there probably won’t be much action taken once a user reposts the shared meme. Rosenblatt (2020) demonstrates that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were a great example of digital activism combined with a purposeful call to action. Within the digital space, all kinds of posts on different social media platforms surfaced after the death of George Floyd regarding the topic of racial inequality present in our society. It was then followed by users re-sharing links to donate to the cause followed by dates and times to different peaceful protests happening all throughout the United States.

References:

Illia, L. (2003). Passage to cyberactivism: How dynamics of activism change. Journal of Public

Affairs, 3(4), 326–337. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1002/pa.161

Khoros Staff. (2021). How social communities and social networks differ. Khoros. (2021) https://khoros.com/blog/how-social-communities-social-networks-differ.

Mahoney L. M., & Tang T. (2016). Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change.

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Cyberactivism - linking our personal values and experiences to our digital communities

How It Works

Is Cyberactivism Effective Towards The Cause?