Digital Culture, Activism and Social Movements in Australia

In 2010, protests and civil war broke out across the Middle East, and social media played a significant role in raising global awareness of the events dubbed the Arab Spring (Faris, 2011; Faris & Meier, 2013). The Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 saw social media used as a mechanism to show global support and empathy. For example, in the days following the January attack on the publication Charlie Hebdo, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie spread across social media and at the time was named one of the most popular hashtags in Twitter history, with more than 5 million uses. The second incident, which took place in November – in this instance a coordinated attack by gunmen and suicide bombers – also saw social media users expressing their support and compassion for Parisians, this time with the hashtag #PrayForParis which was used more than 7 million times. In the United States, #BlackLivesMatter was tweeted 9 million times in just 2015, and over 30 million times by September 2016, with the hashtag becoming a social calling card for social justice and racial equality activists across not only the United States but globally. Taking a different form, the 'It Gets Better Project' – created by media personality Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, in response to an increase in suicides in the United States by teens bullied because of their sexual orientation – is a video campaign to let LGBT youth know that life does indeed 'get better'. This project began when Savage and Miller uploaded the first 'It Gets Better' video on the campaign's official YouTube page on 21 September 2010. This video has since been viewed more than 2 million times. Since then, more than 50,000 video entries have been uploaded from around the world on the campaign's website, receiving more than 50 million views as of January 2017. The 'It Gets Better Project' continues to engage the community – both online and in person (via conferences, pride festivals and government outreach) – to rally for LGBT rights and equality on six continents.

In just the first weeks of January 2017, in Australia, we have between us received multiple digital updates from activist organisations we follow. We have also undertaken a range of actions using digital media tools, including donating to causes, signing campaign petitions, sending emails to politicians and other decision-making bodies, forwarding issue and campaign information through social media ourselves and using apps to support ethical consumption practices. For many of us, digital media is how we do activism in the everyday. We might not be carrying out distributed denial of service attacks – a tactic that involves sending so many requests to a target website that it crashes, described by some hacktivists as a kind of virtual 'sit-in' (see Sauter, 2014) – to draw attention to specific inequities, and we might not be physically chained to a tree or a bulldozer or holding a sign in a physical protest, but our 'clicktivism' is still activist action. Or is it? Has the ubiquity and convenience of digital technologies within the lives of many of us watered down our sense of what it means to take action? Is signing an online petition and sharing it with our friends in social media anything like the activism of earlier decades? Marching in a PRIDE protest in the 1980s and 1990s in Australia carried with it real physical dangers although it also gave rise to strong senses of solidarity; participating in the blockade protesting the proposed damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania carried with it a real chance of imprisonment (1,217 arrests were made, many simply for being present at the blockade, and nearly 500 people were imprisoned for breaking the terms of their bail) and again facilitated that strong sense of being part of a community. A similar situation prevailed during the 2016 and 2017 protests in Perth in Western Australia against the extending of a major highway through wetlands. Participating in a physical sense in any long-term protest also carries with it other material effects such as loss of income. Signing and sharing an online petition or carrying out other online actions rarely carries with it the same kinds of material effects as non-virtual activism. This is the sense in which Shonda Rhimes (2014) stated, in her invited 2014 Commencement Speech for Dartmouth College, that 'A hashtag is not helping', continuing with:

Hashtags are very pretty on Twitter. I love them. I will hashtag myself into next week. But a hashtag is not a movement. A hashtag does not make you Dr. King. A hashtag does not change anything. It's a hashtag. It's you, sitting on your butt, typing on your computer and then going back to binge-watching your favorite show.

And yet, perhaps this is to forget that there always have been many components essential for an activist action to be successful, with two of these being communication and visibility. One person standing in protest simply does not have the same impact as 100, let alone 1,000. What about a 10,000- or 100,000-strong petition delivered to the relevant authority? In this context, international activist organisations such as AVAAZ – launched in 2007 – can work effectively on the global scale only due to digital media technologies. With 44,672,981 members spread throughout 194 countries (as of April 2017), it is only through the temporal and spatial compressions made possible by digital technologies that AVAAZ's (2016) online community has the capacity to

act like a megaphone to call attention to new issues; a lightning rod to channel broad public concern into a specific, targeted campaign; a fire truck to rush an effective response to a sudden, urgent emergency; and a stem cell that grows into whatever form of advocacy or work is best suited to meet an urgent need.

In particular, AVAAZ operates according to a model of tipping point moments – what AVAAZ's founder, Ricken Patel, calls 'crisistunity' (as cited in Cadwalladr, 2013) – collecting public support of causes but only delivering it when a massive, global public outcry has the potential to make a significant difference. Digital media technologies make this work – and this timing – possible, as they did the coordination of the protests of the Arab Spring. They facilitate consciousness raising in a massively extended mode to that practised in earlier decades where you, in effect, had to be in the right place at the right time. Rather than needing to have your street and house leafletted – and reading the leaflet before it was thrown out – or passing a notice or being stopped on the street and invited to attend a meeting, the vast interconnected networks of digital media with their multiplicity of hubs and nodes through which information is circulated...