Mark Ruffalo and Social Media: making space for passion and activism
Mark Ruffalo is a multi award-winning actor, originally from Wisconsin, USA. His acting career, now coming up on about 20 years, has led him through a range of roles, from the likeable love interest to the Hulk in the Avengers franchise to the irreplaceable characters in Shutter Island, The Kids Are All Right and Spotlight. At almost 50 years old, he has settled into a comfortable and credible acting career that has created a wide reaching social platform that allows him to fight the bad guys on and off the screen.
Today, if you follow Mark Ruffalo on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Intsagram and/or Tumbr), you’ll know he is a passionate activist, and a very present and active one at that. His Facebook and Twitter bios are respectively “Husband, father, actor & director. I post about Water Defense, The Solutions Project, & acting projects. I hope you find something here worth sharing.” and “I’m a husband, father, actor, director, and a climate change advocate with an eye on a better, brighter, cleaner, more hopeful future for all of us.”. He doesn’t beat around the bush, he tells you exactly who he is and what you can expect from him on social platforms — his brand is clear.
Not only is his brand clear, but the way he uses social media generally — perhaps how he sees his own purpose on the internet even — is very interesting. Mark Ruffalo uses social media as a tool to promote art, share knowledge and push his activist agenda, and to be honest, it’s freakin’ awesome. I’m going to briefly dive into a couple of things that I’ve noticed about his social media, most notably:
- his personal brand on social media,
- credibility on social media,
- the content he shares mixed with the reach he has and it’s effect on the filter bubble,
- his personal activism and its promotion of slacktivism vs. activism, and
- the idea of a one sided conversation on social media.
So, to touch quickly again on Ruffalo’s brand, he has been able to be a force of consistency on social media for a long time. Ruffalo has, going back years, been just as active as he is today. Using the US election as a benchmark (because who wasn’t an activist during that time), he still shares just as much information, in the same way, and with the same goal in April 2017 as he did in November of 2016. His ability to understand his own brand — his own why as Simon Sinek would say — has allowed him a totally transparent and unabashedly honest space on the internet that people are actually drawn to because of its candidness and passion. On top of that, as a consumer it’s clear that he totally runs his own social media, which really just makes him more relatable and down to earth. To even just refer back to his bios, they truly resonates with the idea of branding — you have to know your brand inside and out, and be totally truthful to it all the time, which is exactly what Ruffalo does.
Ruffalo’s content is both clearly planned as the content is genuine, impactful and personal, yet spontaneous as it is always very current. Furthermore, I just want to note the credibility that Ruffalo creates for himself in sharing content from others. The act of sharing content from credible sources, people and organizations emphasizes the legitimacy of his own brand. Important in this as well is that he is able to still add elements of personalization to his posts which also adds to the authenticity of his brand. This is the kind of content that many large organizations struggle with, but they should definitely take some notes from Ruffalo.
This leads right into his reach. Ruffalo uses his huge following as a platform to talk and share about important issues, ranging from politics to the environment to human rights. With 3.2M followers on FB and 3.1M on Twitter, let alone his other platforms, Ruffalo’s posts have the potential to be seen (and let’s be real, probably are seen) by millions of people. When I realized this I really started to consider how this plays into the concept of filter bubbles. In class we talked a lot about how when we, as average joes, share things on social media they often exist in a bubble of algorithms that really just result in preaching to the choir a lot of the time. With my ~1000 friends, the information I share on social media isn’t really getting past my close circle of friends who mostly already think the same way I do. But does Ruffalo, with his millions of followers, puncture that filter bubble? Does his information reach a larger population of people outside his own political views or values just because of the sheer numbers? You’d have to think yes, right? Not all 6 million + of his followers can be left leaning, hard core activists, can they? Well, I’m going to say no, they can’t be simply because of Ruffalo’s film career, especially considering the Avengers franchise. This franchise definitely pulls a diverse group of people to his fan base that exist all over the political spectrum. Again, I would assume that this would only add to the range of people who are seeing his social media activism, who would normally be outside his filter bubble. Really, I do not have an answer to if this is true or not, but with the right assumptions it seems plausible. Regardless of it’s legitimacy, it’s really interesting to consider the impact that celebrity activities might actually be having.
On that note though, does his personal activism on social media promote actual action for the followers or just slacktivism? With the definition of activism being “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change” Ruffalo definitely hits the nail on the head. He not only (almost) exhaustively shares articles, petitions and other information on social media, but he attends rallies and marches, creates documentaries, and more in support of the causes he cares about. But, do his followers that perhaps exist in a space of less privilege and fewer resources have the same ability to be such passionate activists or will they just be slacktivists? Well, this depends how you define slacktivism. Slacktivism is technically defined as putting very low involvement into a cause via the internet, but is signing a useful petition that was shared with you via the internet that millions of other individuals also sign via the internet that ends up actually creating change actually slacktivism? Or is it just a version of activism. In this sense, Ruffalo does share many federal government petitions, websites for small grassroots changemakers to support, as well as copious amounts of general information and news updates about various causes, and according to Leo Mirani in “Sorry Malcolm Gladwell, the Revolution may well be tweeted” this type of awareness and influence could actually be considered activism. So in that, in addition to being an activist himself, I would argue that Ruffalo is pushing for and providing a space for a new kind of 21st century activism for his followers as well.
To build on this idea of activism though, a difficult aspect of celebrity activism is that they do not engage in conversation with their followers. Ruffalo does share a lot of information, but rarely if ever does he actually respond to people in the comments. This is two fold because yes, although it does just push a one sided conversation (Ruffalo to the public), there are inevitably people who have the same view as him that would step up to fill in in his absence. And that in and off itself might be better because it engages more everyday people in the conversation and awareness. This idea of a one sided conversation is interesting though as it notes the way social media exists as a very accessible two-way conversation platform in many cases, but simultaneously perpetuates the feeling of emptiness. If no one responds or even sees certain posts in the overwhelmingly fast content curation on social media, who are we talking to? What endless abyss of one sided relationships are we participating in? Is Mark Ruffalo perpetuating this one-sided conversation or is he providing a platform for people otherwise not connected to communicate?
Really, Mark Ruffalo is just doin it right. He uses genuinely crafted and credible content to share important information about relevant and current social issues that inspires activism and education and push beyond his, and other’s, filter bubbles (wow!). Now, maybe I’ve been biased this whole time because Ruffalo (along with Emma Watson, duh) are some of my celebrity heroes.. But who can deny that this guy is doing good things by just using his huge following as a platform for talking about important topics?
So, my social media goal for 2017? Be more like Mark Ruffalo — aka be a passionate, engaged and active citizen and share important opportunities, information, and projects with those around me. You go Glenn Coco!
