CUTE CATS, TWITTER BOTS, AND FUZZY FACESHOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO HACKTIVATE YOUR CAUSE.

Hi everyone! My name is Steph Hendrick. I am an assistant professor in the Department of Electronic Media Communication at MTSU. Ive been researching emerging media and technology for about 14 years, until recently at a university in the very north of Sweden.

And no. Contrary to my topic listed, I am not here to tell you about all the cute cats online.

You are more likely to find me racing reindeer than playing with cats.

My research interests vary, and have taken a winding path, but they all converge around activism. How we perform our identity, and how we use digital technologies to experience each others realities. Lately I have been very interested in how we can use digital media and tech to hack our experiences. How we can augment our reality. How we can gain critical mass and momentum - but also bridge a gap of dispassion and alienation. And these, are the very concepts we explore with our theories of cute cats (really is a thing), our twitter bots, and today - our fuzzy faces.

Counter narrativehate speechCorruptionReligious Extremism

So activism can mean many things. And it seems to vary according to the side on which you are acting for or against. BUT, all activism really is - despite the form in which it appears - is a counter narrative to a dominant discourse.

Activists use a variety of social media to counter narratives of hate, corruption and extremism. But they have to do so in a way which hacks the places where those they want to engage already are. This, in fact, IS the cutecattheory. This theory of communication states that when attempting to engage with your audience, you dont build a new platform for them to gather around - you go to the places they are already showing pictures of their cute cats. So hacktivism is a way of describing how we use existing technology to hack dominant narratives.

So lets talk about a few tactics activists use to create a critical mass, and give some examples of them. THEN, we start our own!

Techniques of HacktivismActivate your people.Make it personal.Make it visual.Gamify your cause.Crack them up (if possible)

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Activate your PeopleHactivism Technique:

There are a few ways that these campaigns start. Through a spark that is spread and people need to be activated to fight it - or by activating people around a known cause. So more well ways to activate people are organic - through spreading info via tags, hashtags, sharing videos, etc.

A current way that activists are using to gather people is through twitter bots. These bots are known as botivists. haha. They target people to get them involved in activism. They programers have used marketing strategies to try to move people toward the collective. They find people who tweet about a certain interest (corruption, a social movement, etc) or have a certain affiliation. The bots attempt to organize people. They get in touch with you by mentioning you and others - these tweets begin to connect people and call you to action. The bot acts as a seed. It does not suggest what to do, rather connects people in a way beyond the hashtag.

Trolling the TrollsSelf-help videos targeting sexist language

A great example of this is the trolling the trolls bot. When a twitter user was identified as using sexist language, a bot will automatically detect likely trolls on Twitter and have a series of coaching videos sent to them, along with motivational tweets encouraging them to assess and address why they feel the need to harass women over social media.

Twitter, comedy, bots, targeted audience

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/trolling-the-trolls-with-sexism-hunting-twitter-bots

WhatsApp is now the primary platform for political trash talk in Tanzanias election campaignhttp://qz.com/510899/whatsapp-is-now-the-primary-platform-for-political-trash-talk-in-tanzanias-election-campaign/

When people talk about the intersection of social media and politics, the focus is usually on the ways that Facebook and Twitter are changing how politicians connect with voters. Things are a bit different in Africa, where the mobile phone has changed not only the way people communicate but the very nature of their financial lives.

WhatsApp is a preferred tool of choice for propaganda, mudslinging, and negative messaging, a digital media strategist tells Quartz, requesting anonymity in order to openly discuss how the platform is being used by political parties. The app is the go-to platform for messaging you cant say yourself that surrogates can do for you, the strategist adds. In this way, WhatsApp networks are similar to Super PACs in the US, the officially unaffiliated groups that nonetheless raise money and cater directly for their chosen candidates whims.

Cheap data, low tech thresh hold

Make it personalHactivism Technique:

Personalizing the cause - putting a face on it - makes it harder to turn away. Or not empathize. It makes the problem enter the collective consciousness, and as that changes, so does pervasive attitudes.

Here 10 hours of walking down NYC streets is condensed into a walk of catcalls. It calls into question the rhetoric of how a woman may ask for it versus the freedom to walk. (show snippet of video)

(visual, audible, popular medium, easily spread, data heavy)

Bye Felipe

An example of a shared collection of personal stories can be seen through the hashtag #byefelipe. This is a collection of screenshots of what women who date online often often get. So here we are seeing a use of hashtag, visuals (screenshots), and commentary. They are curating a shared experience.

(hashtag, visual, instagram, comment functions)

Another example of this is the pushback against body ideals of size. A combo of Meghan Trainers song All about that bass and Tess Holidays modeling contract sparked a hashtag #effyourbeautystandards.

Visual heavy, heavily posed pictures, comments (mainly supportive)

Make it visualHactivism Technique:

Going off the last example, make things visual. You remember the ice bucket challenge, right? It went viral. Everyone dumped a bucket of ice over their heads. There was pushback - we will see that example next - but there is also something to be said for so called slacktivism. Slacktivism means basically doing something you think will make some difference, but really has little meaning. Like clicking like. Or favoriting. HOWEVER, this is a way to hack a cause. While it may seem small and insignificant, again, the more engagement a piece of social media has, the bigger audience it has. The question then becomes how much retention it gets when it hits a critical mass.

So while the ice bucket challenge was fun and reportedly helped fundraise research for ALS, there was also a pushback from people aware of the luxury of clean water that is always available.

There were many memes and videos that portrayed women walking to get water for miles. So while making the ALS water challenge visible, it also highlighted the problem of clean water in huge chunks of the world.

We have to mention, of course, how social media has made visible what was once bounded by regulated media. Ive put a few pictures here of the Saffron Revolution, so lets talk about it for a second. By using cheap cell phone pictures and blogs, images of horrific human rights abuses were brought out again into the collective consciousness. (The government attempted to block all websites and services that could carry news or information about Myanmar, barring access to web-based email. However protesters were able to access the Internet anyway and as a result the protests received a never before seen level of international news coverage.[177] bloggers in Yangon succeeded in circumventing the censors, posting pictures and videos on blogs almost as soon as the protests began. Many of these images were picked up by mainstream news organizations, because bloggers had managed to capture images that no one else was able to get. )

What happens when those images disappear is for another talk. The thing to take from this now is how a picture can truly spark a revolution.

Another example of this is the event that started the arab spring movement. When Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire in protest, the images of this sparked a movement that reburverated throughout the middle east over 3 years.

The image on the left is of Hodder, an Iranian blogger who was imprisioned for blogging about the former regime. While it was text that led to his imprsionment, using his image on tools like Facebook eventually led to his release. (example of long term movement)

Gamify your causeHactivism Technique:

EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world.It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere.The goal of the social network game is to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.The games first season began on March 3, 2010 and ended on May 12th, 2010.

EVOKE was developed by the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and directed by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal.

Another developing, and to me very exciting, turn in hacktivism is augmented reality. Beyond gaming, I want to show you a project by Nonny de la pena and her immersive journalism about children in syria.

Crack them upHactivism Technique: If you can

Combine humor and the visual, audible, the social collective moment to parody your cause. Gamify or mix mediums to produce a fun way for your group to engage. Look at flashmob like pillow fighting on the DC mall. Or having a pretend gun flight where everyone falls down dead at one time.

So one last thought before we break. I intentionally focused on small scale activism in this talk. We didnt go into larger movements for a reason. Right now, we are still trying to work on the long term retention of these movements. However, I want to stress how IMPORTANT the small scale acts of activism here are. We can not change discourses on a large scale without this important identity work on a smaller scale. Researchers are looking into the differences between movements like the civil rights movement and the stickiness of its power. What we are finding is that while these tools are GREAT at bringing together people quickly, and necessary to get an alternative voice heard, they lack the same staying power because we have not learned to wield them over time. To change tactics as needed - as they did in the civil rights movement (lunch counter sit-ins, marches, flyers). As we do small scale activism, we will get better at wielding the technology on a larger scale.

TechniquesActivate your people.Make it personal.Make it visual.Gamify your cause.Crack them up (if possible)

Tools(For now)Remember CUTECATTwitter, YouTube, Audioboom, Soundcloud, Blogs, Snapchat, Instagram

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Time Capsule selfie

#remembermovember #bcn15Hacktivism

Selfie with a difference. Inspired by the south african artist, She jap chumba - where she explored South Africans feelings about their future.

Creatively explore the movemeber movement. You may want to talk about healthcare, how this moment compares to Octobers breast cancer awareness movement. About your own hopes or fears for the future. What you may be doing to preserve your own health.

All About That BassMeghan TrainorMeghan TrainorMeghan Trainor & Kevin KadishTitle (Deluxe)2015-01-09T08:00:00Zscreenmedia@icloud.com2015-10-17 05:32:09Title (Deluxe)SonyBMG:isrc:USSM11401317