Cyber Activism

In this modern era, the majority of the people’s task are getting easier by having advanced technologies on their side when proceed all the activities they do. Besides of its simple and quick usage, technology could collect all the required data and produce quality result without any mistakes that people sometimes do human error when executing the task manually, which makes technology to become very essential for all the human activity. Social media is one of the technology that is used by all people around the world to communicate with each other even without meet each other face-to-face. Aside of the communication, people use social media to post their daily activity or read some news or view other people’s post, which social media provides real-time information that continuously updated every time. Recently, the use of social media can attract participants’ attention to take actions related to hot topics. As the result, ability for collective action is becoming one of the greatest advancements of social media. Frequently, social movements driven by new communication technologies are called cyber activists, which change the perspective of collective action.    

According to Howard (2011), cyber activism is the action of using internet for advancing the goals of political needs that requires more effort to advance through offline. In general, cyber activism, also known as Internet activism, online activism, digital activism, online organizing, electronic advocacy, e-campaigning and e-activism, is the technique of using internet-based socializing along with communication methods used to create, operate, and manage variety of activism, which permit any individual or organization to establish social networks and other online technologies to encourage followers, broadcast messages and progress a cause or movement. Similar to physical activism, the objective of cyber activism is to initiate a citizen-based movement toward a specific goal, cause or objective by using social networking tools and platforms to share and broadcast mottos and messages, and to interact with netizens, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other popular social media as well as email, instant messaging (IM) and other online collaboration tools. Cyber activism can be used for various purposes depending on the cause or need of the e-activist, such as awareness creation, gathering and organizing followers and initiating reactions. For example, e-activists use e-petitions digitally signed by several followers before they are sent to government and legislative authorities. Other than that, there are several usage of cyber activism in real life, such as Hacktivism, TikTok activism, use in political campaigns, corporate activism, religious activism, sexual assault activism, Non-traditional activism, and other aspects that able to earn quick response and effective communication by citizen movements. The theory of collective action in cyber activism has been studied for half a century with the guidance of the resource mobilization theory.   

McCarthy & Zald (1977) and Jenkins (1983) give their statement that even though the theory of resource mobilization often criticized, the premise of this theory is it is not enough to spark social change with just having desire, dissent, and attitude change as the necessity of resources, such as time, money, and organizational skills is the most critical for a successful social movement. In order to gathering large participant of social movement, theory of mobilization can be used for maximize the implementation of resource mobilization theory.  

According to Rosenstone and Hansen (2003), mobilization is the process by which candidates, parties, activists, and groups induce other people to participate. Mobilization research basically examines large social movements and activism, and deals with the planning, execution, and facilitation of these actions, which can be used to proceed the premise of behavior change through social media messages by fulfilling both the advancing of media messages and an execution/facilitation strategy.  

We can conclude that cyber activism is the process of gathering the response of other people through online approaches, such as social media or other online tools, to take the action for fulfilling the objective of the activism. By using cyber activism, it could help activists or organizations to get the attention of the targeted audience through social media or other online tools that able to approach large number of participants to initiate the action.   

References: 

Textbook:

• Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change. L. Meghan Mahoney and Tang Tang. (2017). 

Website:

• https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/right/cyber-activism  
• https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27973/cyberactivism  
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_activism#Examples_of_early_activism