Protesting & Advocating Through Social Media Platforms: Does it work? (Ethnography)

For my project I will be analyzing how social media and other news outlets affect the participation of student activists at UMBC. I will be interviewing the student activists at UMBC and asking them questions like how affective they think social media is when it comes to being an activist. After reading one of my classmates (Conor Kennedy) posts, I was really struck by his statement that “face-to-face communication and meetings creates a sense of accountability that can easily be ignored if it is done through screens.” I was thinking about how I could apply this to my research and interviews. When people are reading activists’ posts on social media, it makes it easier for them to ignore the actual problem and not take accountability that they might be apart of the problem. I want to further my interviews by asking people who are NOT activists but see some of these posts on social media if they find it easier to ignore social issues and posts because they are on the internet rather than talking to someone about the issue in person. I also read my other classmates post and she writes about “how powerful we can be as a society when we come together in numbers and resist the lies and hatred being said by leaders and government officials” (Cali Drouillard). This is interesting because she says they are power in numbers. I wonder if this is true for social media platforms as well.