Being an activist on a campus with mostly apathetic students
often leaves me wondering “how can I get the word out to the largest number of
students?” In order for a campaign to be effective, it must be heard loud and
clear by whomever the decision makers may be—the administration, the city
council, etc—and the more people speaking up, the louder the demands are.
Using social media is typically the first step student
groups take in this mobilization process, but it is far from the most effective
medium. Anytime a new group forms or an event is planned, a new page on
Facebook is sure to be made and personal posts are pretty much guaranteed. Social
media is the necessary floor from which a movement can build in today’s world.
However, organizing is about the extent of the usefulness of social media.
Engaging in public debate on these forums solves very little if anything at all.
They are what Michael Hart calls a “zero institution,” a place for political actors
go to feel like they’re doing something ultimately letting their ideas die if
they do not make their way out of the interwebs.
The article on the geographies of resistance has me thinking
about potential alternative mediums for ideas to proliferate, momentum to
build, and voices to be heard. And what better way to resist than breaking the
law with art that all can see? I find graffiti to be incredibly fascinating, even
when the extent of the political intent is to simply display your name. Members
of the student organization I am a part of must also find it interesting,
because we’ve paintedthe graffiti wall on Richland Avenue a couple of times
this year. We deal mostly with ongoing mass atrocities, which continue to exist
in large because nobody cares enough to do anything about them if they have no
direct connection to the violence.
Fall semester, we painted gENDer-based violence in order to
increase the relevance of this perspective in the public sphere. Earlier this
semester, we painted something that allowed concerned passer-by’s to act. From this
we learned that graffiti itself can mobilize, and hallelujah for hashtags. We
figured out a way to get people to act by painting:
“2 million
displaced
70,000
deaths
2 years
0 solutions
#syriasly?!”
I was incredibly surprised by how many people stared at it
as they walked by, but more importantly how many people used that hashtag on
Twitter and engaged in the conversation. From Twitter, people were directed
towards syriasly.org where there is a petition to sign and information to
access. This was a unique intermarrying of social media and the public sphere that
I think has been largely overlooked. The lesson: graffiti can reach people
social media may not have otherwise reached and direct them towards taking
further action on geographically far away issues with geographically far away
solutions. These movements are necessary in order to end mass atrocities across
the globe, and social media may not be the epitome of the detriment to the
democratic process that Mitchel suggest in “The End of Public Space?” after all.
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