Weak Ties vs. Real Social Change

BLOG #3

 

According to Malcom Gladwell, a well-known author in the area of social media, social media are built around weak ties and real social change can never come from loose networks of people that do not know each other. Do you think that social media has the potential to bring about real social change?

I definitely think social media takes a lot of the responsibility out of real social change. It has become extremely easy to click a button and all of a sudden support a cause without actually doing anything else. Not to say that this doesn’t help. Some national change campaigns are built around the idea of simply just tweeting a certain ‘hashtag’ which usually sends a financial donation to the known cause. An example of this even happened a couple weeks ago with the Bell Let’s Talk campaign.  Bell would donate 5 cents for every tweet with the hashtag BellLetsTalk, Facebook share, texts and long distance calls (made on a bell phone) on February 12^th 2013. There were over 96,266,266 tweets etc. which led Bell to donate over 4.8 million dollars to Canadian Mental Health. It definitely set an unprecedented national conversation, and nearly everyone on Twitter/Facebook that day either tweeted or shared something to do with it. It showed how powerful using social media can be and how easily it can involve and reach people around the country. 

But unfortunately it can also be overwhelming the amount of causes and campaigns that are floating around social media sites. Its virtually so easy to say you like every program or campaign trying to make a difference around the world, but sometimes no one’s actually doing anything or supporting them, even financially. Remember Kony 2012? When word of this campaign first got out, everyone on Facebook and Twitter quickly and rapidly began supporting it. For weeks, Facebook pages were being created, people were tweeting Kony 2012 rally dates etc. but unfortunately when the day arrived, barely anyone did anything. It created a false hope. I think maybe the idea has to happen quickly. If you want social change it has to happen fast. You can’t hope the support or followings of social media will continue giving you attention after a couple weeks. Our generation gets bored quickly and we move onto other fads or interesting things people are talking about.