Protest online for sure, but real action still counts

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/30/change-dot-org-clicktivism-online-petitions

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It would be remiss of me to sneer at “clicktivism” – joining internet petitions to achieve sociopolitical aims – when I’ve succumbed to it myself. Every so often, a petition comes along, and it’s a case of, well, why not sign it? Change.org’s new British managing director for Europe, Simon Willis, goes further, saying of the sarcastic chatterati who scoff at the proliferation and ease of online petitions that they have no viable alternative and their only remaining weapon is “whingeing about the bastards”.

To an extent, I’m with Willis. Protest is a numbers game. If you can get enough people behind a cause, if it scares up a reaction from people in power, then where’s the harm? In this way, you become like the fabled old Hollywood stars thinking in terms of not reading their press cuttings, but weighing them. Clicktivism is definitely quicker, more streamlined, than, say, organising people to turn up at marches. What’s wrong with that? Why should popular protest stay old-fashioned when everything else in the world has changed?

Clicktivism’s ease of use is an asset and it would be the height of lazy, pointless cynicism to frame it negatively. In this context, only a warped, overly precious Luddite mind would demand that signing a petition be rendered laborious and difficult in order for it to truly mean something.

Related: Don't sniff at clicktivism, says new British boss at Change.org

Yet the effortlessness of clicktivism continues to jar on various levels, even with sometime clickers such as myself. For one thing, those large numbers don’t just stay in one area. When it’s so easy to not only sign a petition, but also to make one, the danger is that there are going to be more issues than anyone could possibly care about and remain focused or, indeed, sane. This results in a culture of “pop-up” issues, which, just like the shops, spring fully formed from nowhere, only to disappear just as quickly, as if they never happened.

Moreover, a significant swath of this is occurring within self-defined progressive communities, “preaching to the converted”, namely each other – endlessly signing each other’s petitions in some never-ending carousel of misguided worthiness that verges on the comical.

Perhaps even more worrying are the perils of what amounts to click-inertia – whereupon once a petition has been joined or shared, the clickers decide that they have done their bit for humanity, or whatever, and a kind of self-satisfied, existential torpor sets in. In this way, clicktivists arguably become less motivated than not just regular activists but even those who have done absolutely nothing – for at least the latter group know they have done nothing. By contrast, the clicktivists get the rather spurious feeling that by clicking on this or that petition they have achieved something rather wonderful… job done!

Are people so woefully starved of positive attention that they need to join what could be sanctimonious “Have a heart, guv!” uprisings for validation – sometimes, if they’re honest, for “views” they barely hold in their heads for longer than five minutes at a time? The point is, that, while signing an online petition is something (in the sense that it isn’t nothing), it doesn’t solve everything, not in the way the seductive ease of the online petition suggests.

If the chatterati has become cynical, then this could be because it seems increasingly obvious that what lies ahead is a future scenario where even a petition with enormous, startling numbers becomes completely meaningless, as easy to ignore as it was to sign.

So, while Willis may challenge click cynics to think of an alternative, perhaps it is also important that people like him think of one too – to ensure that this valuable resource for protest doesn’t gets lost in an era where ideological gestures evaporate into thin air almost as soon as you make them.

A sunny, smiley goth would be socially doomed. I should know

A study in the Lancet psychiatry journal reports that goth teenagers were three times more likely to be depressed. It was unclear as to whether this was because goth made teenagers depressed or depressed teens were more likely to be goth. I can speak with some authority on this subject, as someone oft accused of having form on the goth front in my youth (I’m still sticking to my story that I was an “urban gypsy”, though “noir-punk” also has a certain ring to it).

Moving swiftly along, and completely ignoring the serious side of this study, I would posit that goth peer pressure (the need to act doomy in front of your equally nihilistic, becrimped, backcombed mates) might also play a part.

Had my youthful self been asked about my psychological wellbeing, I would have answered in as cynical, hopeless and foreboding terms as possible. Actually, I probably still would, but, back then, anything a bit chirpier, perhaps a stated whim to join the netball team, would have meant instant social death . Meaning no disrespect to the scientists, perhaps this was a problem – how many self-declared goths did they expect to find with optimistic, sunny personalities?

Facebook beats family by the end of the long holiday

Mark Zuckerberg was excited that last week, for the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day, even though some tech experts would argue that this was merely a statistic waiting to happen.

Why has this surge happened now? At least where Britain is concerned, I can’t help but feel that the late August factor of seemingly endless school holidays should not be discounted. I’m speaking for parents and children alike (but mostly parents) when I say that they’re always dragging on a bit by now. Rather pointlessly, some might say, seeing as there’s no corn to thresh, hay to bale, wheat to sheaf, or whatever used to happen during harvest season in yon olden times.

These days, there’s no such industry. And make no mistake, your pathetic attempts at jollity are probably driving your children crazy: what’s with this sudden obsession with throwing bread at ducks in the park – are you having a nervous breakdown or something?

By late August, everyone is beyond bored with family time, and at the brink of bursting into tears at the thought of yet another stressful, expensive, ill-conceived excursion to a “sight”.

Among other summer trips this year, I ended up on the London Eye, which was quite an experience for this vertigo sufferer, leastways from what I could tell through splayed fingers, muted screams of terror, whispered prayers to a forgotten god, and an attempt at a foetal position while still standing up.

It makes sense that by this late stage of the holiday season, kids and adults alike are “familied out” and liable to seek solace on social media, where you can “be” with other people without leaving the house – cue sites such as Facebook, for those old enough.

On to the internet the different generations go, because that’s one way of “escaping” from each other, without physically running away. All of which presents us with an opportunity to ponder solemnly on what happened to the emotional landscape of childhood of yore: apple scrumping, stream paddling, den building and the like.

Such an important, interesting debate to have, but frankly by late August, who truly gives a fig?