Week 5 Reflection

The most influential consequence of these first five weeks has been the awareness brought to me about digital activism. I have never really thought about digital activism, at least, I have never separated it from physical(?) activism. I think that my assumption has always been that there are activist organizations out there, and they use the internet to help promote their cause, but I have never thought about how effective or ineffective these methods are, or how important they are. After becoming aware of the distinction, and beginning to think about what digital activism is, I developed a skeptical bias towards digital activism. I noted in my first assignment that I feel a lack of intimacy in digital activism, and while I still hold this concern to a certain extent, by developing a broader knowledge of what digital activism is, I am beginning to focus on the distinction I noted before. It seems to me that digital activism has a specific cause, to broaden communication, but it also can make a real difference in physical change. For example, one of the websites I chose to rhetorically analyze focused on petition postings where users could sign petitions electronically. Reading through the website I saw not only petitions that moved me, but also that a lot of these petitions have made real difference in policy making and societal perspective. So while up to now we have been focused on developing a sense of what activism and digital activism are, I think moving forward my focus will turn towards the effectiveness and the outcomes that digital activism produces.