Week 6

 How has social media played a role in the 2020 civil rights movement and protests?

Social media started to become an outlet for everyone's feelings, opinions, thoughts, and beliefs. When I was living in Seattle, I noticed specifically on Instagram people were getting borderline harassed for not posting a black square to show allyship, then it switched and people that did post a black square received some sort of backlash. It wasn't just the black square post's I noticed in Seattle, it seemed like people were just posting things to make them look oppressed or look like their fighting for something. I would say social media influenced a lot of performance activism in Seattle, especially people around my age range. With the barrier of a screen people could share whatever they wanted. 

How is social media changing the way people document history?

The way people document history is always going to be more helpful to the people most similar to who's writing it. That being said social media allows for the extension of perspectives, stories, and significant moments. What I mean by this is that people have a lot more access globally to technology now than ever before. We can take someone's personally experiences as history, so someone's Instagram account could be seen as a glorified history of that person's life. Not everyone glorifies themselves on social media, and not everyone posts at all. The idea that we can permanently post something to the internet allows us to mark our identity into the history of this technological age.

How has social media become a powerful mobilization channel?

Social media is essentially broadcasting our history on the internet, and we call it news stations. I think the idea of what is and isn't history is different from person to person. The world has changed more in the past 400 years then in the past 4 million. I feel like this due to the number of things that get posted online. The number of different opinions, right or wrong, scientifically backed or not, there is so many. I think the act of reading world events just off our phones or computers desensitizes us. Personally, I feel like I have less of a reaction when I hear something crazy happening in the world. I sympathize for the people affected by these issues; however, the human world has been having a lot of issues. Having technology allows the exposure of so many things at once, we disassociate how catastrophic and impactful they can be.