1st Blog Post

Class this week revolved around the topic of slacktivism. This term is used to refer to the phenomenon whereby people put in minimal effort, generally through the medium of the internet, to help with a cause. People tend to still get a good feeling from there minimal effort because they feel like they have made a sufficient contribution to the cause. Therein lies the problem. Most of the time their minimal effort is not enough to generate a change. The question that remains is: is it better to have millions of slacktivists or thousands of activists? Slacktivism is no doubt great at raising awareness about issues. People seem to have no problem sitting behind their computer or phone and retweeting or sharing posts about charity events. GoFundMe pages and other major charity organizations looking to raise money garner millions of shares on social media platforms each year. However, out of the millions that share the article or link to donate, only a small percentage actually contri...

Crowdsourcing was the topic of discussion this week in class. We talked about how the internet can rally people together (the crowd) to offer resources for a certain cause. Ultimately this can turn out to be for very good reasons. Some of the positive things that can come from this include crowdfunding money for a certain cause, helping people find a lost item/person, and raising awareness about a certain idea/ailment. We covered one of the most successful crowdfunding events to occur which was the ALS Ice bucket challenge. This campaign raised millions of dollars and helped promote awareness about a debilitating disease. I had always assumed that everyone was in awe of this positive impact and didn’t see any reason why not to donate, unless of course you just didn’t have the money to donate or simply didn’t feel like it. I am glad that our professor shared with us the story of why Mike Rowe chose not to donate or jump on board with this idea. Mike Rowe reasoned that in the world...

The topic discussed in class this week was the plague of public shaming vectored by social media. More specifically, we looked at parents using social media as a means to punish their kids through embarrassment. We watched a multitude of videos of parents disciplining their children and posting that for the world to see online. Many of the videos were strongly condemned such as a father shaving his daughter’s head and another father shooting his daughter’s laptop. Some of the punishments were tamer such as a father making his son run a short way to school in the morning. However, all of these means of parenting receive a failing grade in my book for one critical error, posting the punishment on social media. There has been heated debate for years on how to properly parent kids, whether it be through punishment or reinforcement, and the severity of each. However, the current day and age has introduced a new tactic of public shaming kids on social media that some parents are exploi...