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In recent years, the internet, and especially social media, have been major factors in political and social protest movements. From uprisings in Hong Kong to US presidential campaigns to the nationwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations, social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been instrumental in organizing and publicizing activist movements for change. On the other hand, however, the past decade has also seen the rise of what some call “slacktivism,” i.e., forms of protest that get a lot of buzz on social media but don't seem to inspire supporters to do anything more meaningful than retweeting or clicking “like.”

By the beginning of next class, please read/watch the pieces linked below, and then, in the discussion thread, please respond to the following questions: 

1. Do you believe that social media is changing the nature of social activism for the better or for the worse? Why? 

2. It’s clear that political scientists would be interested in the social media activism/slacktivism topic — but who else in the academy might be interested? That is, what other scholarly disciplines might gain new insights by studying the rise of internet activism/slacktivism? And why? 

Please aim to be imaginative in your response to the second question, by thinking about scholarly disciplines that, at first glance, may not appear to have an interest in the topic at all, but that should, you decide, be very interested, indeed. For example, why might philosophers be interested in this topic? How about art historians? Anthropologists? Psychologists?  Here are the texts:

· Clay Shirky, "How Social Media Can Make History" (Links to an external site.)

· Malcolm Gladwell,  "Small Change" (Links to an external site.)

Requirements

· Your response should be at least 500 words long.

· It should be posted no later than noon on Friday.

· It should make direct, quoted reference to the arguments put forth by BOTH Shirky AND Gladwell.

· As always, your writing ought to be clean, clear, and polished.

Finally, if you’re wondering what counts as a “scholarly field” or “academic discipline,” just think about  the different schools, departments, etc. at a university like