The politics of social media
My professor says “If it’s political, it’s not art. If it’s art, it’s always political.” Activists are often talking about how mainstream media never directly addresses political issues. To counter that, there is the argument that mediums like film and theater should address the personal within the political and this is where most politics plays a role. In the two mediums based on narrative, there isn’t always room for a protest onstage.
The news is where we interact most directly with politics as audience members. More and more people are saying they receive their news from social media. Studies show that this isn’t some huge increase and that the main news corporations like CNN and MSNBC are still captivating most audiences, however it’s a start.
The major bonus of utilizing social media for spreading awareness is that it is decentralized. Anyone can post anything and any given time and anyone at any location on the planet can receive that information outright. The Arab Spring is our biggest example of the use of social media aiding a cause. In Egypt, where the internet hadn’t yet been censored, protestors used TwitPic, Facebook and Youtube to spread videos of violence and radicalism. These sites are not only good for introducing art into the world, they can be used equally as political platforms that are more agreeable than soap boxes.
In America, we see social media used to address our police brutality problem. At least 102 unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2015, that’s two dead men every week. There is no corrolation between the rate of violent crimes in a city and the rate of slaid innocents by the police. Right now the American populace feels like it is under siege.
At the same time that Black men are being hunted down by the government’s armed gaurds, people are dying at extremely high rates across the country from mass shootings. Just last night, someone very close to my family was in the room while five other people were shot to death by a local terrorist, she and her daughter crouched behind a clothing rack while they listened to the others die.
1,317 people dead in 2015.
All you have to do to see these videos is look up ‘mass shooting’ on Youtube and there are literally hundreds of thousands of results, yet the NRA is still unopposed in a large way and Congress still ignores the issue and Trump is still up for election. He is vehement about loose gun control, just check his Twitter feed.
Since I get to write whatever I actually feel on this blog, I’ll say that I think the issue with using social media as a news source, where the truest facts can be presented in raw form as the videos that were taken at the scene of the crime, is that it isn’t handed to the American populace. You have to actually type something in to find news on Youtube or Twitter if you want it from direct sources. Otherwise, the news only comes to you after it’s been commented on and dissected by a journalist or two. However, it can also have a huge impact if it’s done at a time when some course of action has been taken that will cause huge outrage, like Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. We can’t stop using it for the purpose of guerrilla organization, we just need to get better at it. Corporate news organizations cannot be the only source of information the American populace receives because the entire world is around us, and we must know about it.
