In Marwick & Boyd’s 2010 study on context collapse in the age of Web 2.0 – more specifically in reference to Twitter – they raise points that are immensely relevant to my study of the Women’s March on Washington and the importance of knowing your audience to maximize the effectiveness of social media as a tool for social change.
Although it wasn’t as relevant to my social movement of choice, I thought the aspect of “strategic self-commodification” brought up by the researchers were useful in understanding our behavior on these various social media platforms. Marwick & Boyd argue that Twitter has allowed for the rise of “microcelebrities”, and how the content we post on these platforms are affected by the audience we imagine to be consuming our content. The break that exists between audience imagined and audience invoked is often what drives our behavior to produce and post content that pleases everybody.
In the article, Marwick & Boyd bring up Joshua Meyrowitz’ work “No Sense of Place” (1985) which ascribes the rapid rise of social change in the 1960s to the popularization of electronic media like television and radio “eliminating walls between separate social situations”. According to Meyrowitz, a situationist, situations make up our social order and the rise of a whole new dimension of self-expression brought down the conventional walls of social expression.
This article was published right around the time twitter was gaining popularity (Twitter was established in 2006; this article was published in 2010) so I think some of the analysis is now a little bit outdated. Marwick & Boyd argue about the use of twitter as primarily being to maintain followers and “create and market a personal brand”. I don’t think that the researchers foresaw the capability twitter had to become an entire driving force behind social movements, instead of just being a simple tool and facilitator. The researchers talk about “leveraging” the twitter platform – but now it is so much more than that. It is a whole new driving force of its own.
To dive a little bit deeper into my social media movement of choice, the Women’s March serves for interesting discourse because its social media campaign embodies every single part of Marwick & Boyd’s argument about audience engagement on social media. Earlier I talked about the use of Twitter as an essential tool for starting and maintaining a social fervor towards action or change. The Women’s March actually started on Facebook as a social media platform, with the idea of a March suggested on a popular political facebook page “Pantsuit Nation”. The idea galvanized into an entire March, soon taken up by a steering committee of experienced social activists wanting to make it into a National movement for Women’s Rights in the age of Trump.
Social media was essential in the promotion of the March, however one of its main critiques was that it had no use on the day itself at the physical site of the event. The march was attended by upwards of 3.3 million people across the world, and almost 470,000 people attended the March on Washington. Due to the size of the crowd, almost all forms of communication on the site of the event was paralyzed – no cell service, data connection whatsoever. News Media “The Verge” criticizes the lack of awareness on the kinds of logistical issues the March would face on the day of the event, and that it was lamentable social media was only “useful on the outskirts of the protest and afterwards, to digest dispatches that had been sent whenever a signal could be ferreted out”. This outlines and emphasizes the limitations social media has as a tool for social change – its seemingly boundless capabilities are easily curtailed by simple technological boundaries.
More relevantly to the article, the efforts of the March to remain as “inclusive” as possible was also a difficult feat to achieve. One of the biggest issues the movement ran into was initially when the march was titled “The Million Women’s March”. For some white women, this resonated too much with the 1997 March led primarily by Black women decrying their disenfranchisement. Some Journalists also argued against the march being branded as a “women’s march” – that it seemed like an “anti-fascist bachelorette party” for a “group of girlfriends who had failed to elect a female president”. This level of infighting is common for social media movements that use social media as their main tool to propagate their message.
The March has made every effort to be as inclusive as possible. It’s Guiding Principles make an effort to cover every marginalized population, using only female references where necessary. Their twitter account more than regularly posts about issues of race, reproductive health and voter disenfranchisement without references to a specific gender. Their hashtag campaign to increase voting behavior amongst women is #HearOurVote and not #HearHerVote. However, still a majority of their content is focused on Women’s Issues, staying true to their identity as the “Women’s March”. I personally think this is crucial, because trying to please everyone ends up leaving nobody satisfied.
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