From the past two weeks we have listened to a lot of podcast. The one that stuck out to me was the “Out on the Wire” Bare Bones episode. One important point they make was to have a purpose when telling your story on your podcast. Throughout my time on social media following #blacklivesmatter activist such as Shaun King and others I have seen many disturbing things as an African-American man in America.  One disturbing tweet I saw was the fact that multiple white supremacist have been killing African-Americans in broad daylight. The phenomenon is fairly new and is disturbing for someone who could possibly be a victim of these crimes. Another disturbing tweet was a video of a cop tazing an cooperating person of color. This video was disturbing because it was the same officer that shot an innocent 15 year old kid in the head while he was driving away from the officer. Events such as these make me question whether police forces across the nation are working against people of color. Every time I go on social media there seems to be another instance of blatant bigotry against people of color while a white man isn’t going to jail for raping a woman because it could possibly hurt his future. These post have inspired my purpose for my podcast. I do not want to educate my audience about Joey Bada$$’s album, I want to use his album to educate people on the oppression of African-Americans in America. I truly believe this album has the ability to inspire people. It covers everything from mass incarceration to policing in America. Another important point I learned came from Habermas’s “Introduction from The Structural transformation of the Public Sphere.” It was the fact that mass media is cheap and powerful. We can see these nearly everyday on social media from the United airlines incident or the infamous Pepsi commercial. Twitter and other social media outlets have been turned into the front line for many different forms of activism especially white the #blacklivesmatter movement. Companies now respond to these form of activism. United airlines market share dropped significantly after the incident and Pepsi released an apology via twitter. They also took down the video because of the uproar on social media against the video.

The past couple weeks in twitter history has demonstrated the argument presented in Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be tweeted,” and Mirani’s “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell, the revolution may well be tweeted. Gladwell claims the weak-ties twitter creates are not sufficient enough to facilitate a revolution. Mirani counteracts by claiming the activism that occurs on twitter is simply a redefinition of what activism can be. We saw twitter users making real change after Pepsi released an ad displaying Kendall Jenner giving a cop a can of Pepsi and everyone magically stopped protesting and started partying. Twitter collectively responded with outrage, satire, and general embarrassment that this ad would ever be released. It took less than a day for Pepsi to take down the ad and issue a formal apology. Twitter enacted real change and brought a billion dollar company to its knees. Another important note in twitter activism was brought up in Doctorow’s “We need a serious critique of net activism.” Critics of net activism claim that groups lack direction with many centripetal forces pulling activism efforts in many directions. Doctorow, however, says even in a normal revolution of sorts everyone will not be in concord about the direction of the group as a whole. This can be seen from the Anonymous group or the Nation of Islam during Malcolm X’s life. Both groups were divided but one was part of regular activism and the other was involved with normal activism. Both of these arguments revolving around net activism demonstrate how we must redefine our definition of activism to include this new powerful means of activism.