A letter to the Insta activist
Are you a hero? Or just lazy?
Dear you,
I have a lot of questions.
Here’s the first one, typed with fear: Does the level to which I’m informed about a wrong-doing exist in proportion to my level of sympathy and empathy for those who directly suffer from the wrong-doing?
May I, for example, turn off from news of Rafah, Ukraine, the South African election or Zambia, send money to charity and then move about my pleasant, middle-class life, guilt-free? I have done my best, what else do you want from me? Where do my ethics lie?
And more: if I (or you, to the point) post on social media - a TikTok or an Instagram story, perhaps - about the news, do we affect any change? Or are we signalling to our followers that we are well-informed, deeply passionate individuals? Is our empathy a performance?
Here’s the accusation, typed with fear: I’m sorry, I can’t take you seriously when you deliver a light-hearted selfie and hashtag it #ceasefire. Re-posting from news networks is the laziest form of activism. And I bet you’re giving a convincing performance of being well-informed but couldn’t link the current political situation to the Treaty of Versailles, the Iranian Nuclear Deal, or the first Gulf War. You care enough to post, not enough to sit and study and read and research in-depth.
There’s also a touch of racism in your middle-class millennial social media activism. Why care more about Israel and Palestine and not the drought in Zambia, for example? Or the latest evidence on Indigenous Australian deaths? Or the fact that Delhi reached a top of 52 degrees Celsius last week?
And why do I get so mad at you for posting about these things? Why am I more frustrated at you for posting news articles and clogging up my timeline with doom than I am with the actual doom?
That one I know the answer to.
You are probing at my insecurity: that I am not doing enough. You are perhaps entirely right, and I am entirely wrong. Possibly any form of activism, even if it’s as simple as a hashtag or re-posting news, keeps a citizenry away and alive. And I am simply too tired, too stressed, to do anything other than scroll.
There would be days, I suppose, where I wouldn’t think about global news at all if you didn’t keep it in my feed. I would go about my life, complaining about the weather, a car park, or by e-mail, not sparing a moment to pause on the children in the rubble, the hospitals brought to dust, and the cries of the hungry.
That brings me back to my first question, then. If I were to forget for a day….if I were to surrender to the great, Aussie political apathy of global politics…would anything change?
My instinct is no, it wouldn’t. And that’s the difference between you and me, I suppose. I don’t have hope that this will do anything. And you do. That enough voices in a critical mass exert political pressure and create change is the only thing that’s ever done anything—for good or bad—on the global stage.
So I am frustrated. And I don’t have answers. But I suppose…
I suppose you should keep posting.
I wouldn’t want to take your hope, and I wouldn’t want to remove the pressure you exert, post by post, on the world. But I shall remain quietly uncomfortable from your posting. I am guessing that’s the aim.
With love,
Dave
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You may want to read more about my abusive relationship with social media. Or if you can also access an entire high-school play I’ve written about social media.
Here's a whacky old insight from an old person gives not a shite about social media. How glib and safe I am to not engage in any of it, yep, email is my form of castration and hell. That's enough for me. I do not sit in judgement, but in awe of how time is all but warped in the social media universe. In the time it might take me to scroll through Facebook, I might have made and eaten a batch of waffles - GF ones even - or put on a load of washing and re-potted the mint which is having its Celine Dion moment. I could have gone for a walk and be taking cuttings from trees and shrubs I like (the ones hanging over the council footpath of course). At no time would I feel angst nor worried. I set aside time for read the papers and sometimes buy a few tickets in the chook raffle to raise money for something. This is my bubble, I guess, but it is one that is nourishing and can be accented by a troll through YouTube if I have 10 mins to waste, but only for the funny bits from old movies, or Stanley Tucci making a cocktail with finesse. None of this stops the wars, none of this will feed starving children, and none of this will reduce black deaths in custody. But I can and do vote, I read and I form my decisions on substantively evidenced material from widely sourced culturally different authors and experts ... cos this is the glory of the internet, the library of worlds at our finger-tips, a full on Higgs bosun particle explosion and exchange that consistently updates (quantum excitation, people!) It's extraordinary the access to knowledge and ideas that is available on our phones ... there is wonder still, but the term wonder is a blessing and a curse, like the word "awe": awesome and awful are really the same idea, something that is full of awe. The possibilities for new ideas has never been so present and real, and yet the internet and all the social socials have made it seem burdensome and limiting. I have chosen not to have any skin in the social media game, not because I have any resistance to it, I'm just purely lazy, and its not the hill I want to die on.