Making It Personal: An Ethnographic Study of Small Scale Social Media Activism

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/2b88qd64b

Abstract

Modern day activism has expanded to implement social media, allowing organizations and individual activists entirely new ways of communicating and mobilizing their followers through their own virtual presences. However, considering an underlying detachment from our online selves, how effective are these activism accounts at actually motivating people to take action? This thesis takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the efficacy of social media activism, by conducting interviews with coordinators of activism-related accounts and their followers. Throughout these interviews, I looked at what inspired these coordinators to use social media for activism, how they operate their accounts, and how their followers implement the accounts’ content into their lives. Coordinators use vastly different approaches to motivate followers to participate in activism on and outside of their devices, and each have their own unique implications for the virtual communities created by these accounts. These virtual communities become important spaces for followers to care for their political virtual selves, indicating that social media activism is effective in more subtle and personal ways than would be expected.

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