ENG 2850: Writing for Social Media
Cara Marta Messina
Assignment 3: Participating in Digital Activism
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About Digital Activism
Our readings have focused quite a bit on digital activism and the different methods of digital
activism that take place. Yuhan, your colleague, has already defined digital activism:
● “[Digital activism] is the use of electronic communication technologies such as social media,
especially Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to
enable faster communication by citizen movements and the delivery of local information to
a large audience.” (Yuhan, from our Glossary Terms)
There are, of course, layers to definitions of digital activism. For example, in Alexander and
Hahner’s “The Intimate Screen,” they address how digital activism uses technologies’ affordances to
create connection and familiarity for social justice purposes, or specifically for reshaping narratives
around people with Down syndrome. This type of digital activism is posting images, sharing stories,
and celebrating children with Ds. Christy’s Instagram account is specifically focused on digital
activism & creating an intimate screen.
In "#MyNYPD: Transforming Twitter into a Public Place for Protest" by Tracey Hayes, Hayes
explores how Twitter can be an actual site of protest, not just a place to disseminate information
and form connections. Unlike Christy’s Instagram account, Hayes looks at a collection of Tweets
from various users who hijacked the #MyNYPD hashtag to protest police brutality. By disrupting
this hashtag, digital protestors rejected the NYPD’s attempt at making a connection with the
community.
We also see fan labor merge with digital activism in "Black Panther fandom and transformative
social practices" by Tracy Deonn Walker. Fan labor, or fan composing practices, are the different
creative and analytical approaches fans take to engage with each other and celebrate the texts they
love; in Walker’s article, her subjects are fan--particularly Black fans--of The Black Panther. While
Walker does not straight up refer to these fan labor practices as digital activism, Specifically, she
looks at narrative extraction, which “is the process and labor that audience members undertake
when engaging with narratives that don't represent them as protagonists or fully realized
characters.” While this was important for The Black Panther in the years/months before it came out,
ENG 2850: Writing for Social Media
Cara Marta Messina
these practices are also important for fans of color to engage with and explore characters of color,
findings ways to represent and understand themselves.
We have also seen digital activism in Moya Bailey’s, Les Hutchins, Liza Potts, and so many other
articles.
About this Assignment
For this assignment, you will be participating in digital activism! To participate in digital activism
means you must produce something and post it somewhere. These will be your artifacts. Once you
have posted your artifacts, you will write a short reflection paper due on Tuesday, 06/16. In this
reflection paper, you will talk about the types of artifacts you produced, your cause, your purpose of
these artifacts, and the methods you used. You will then read your peers’ reflections and submit
your final peer review email on Friday, 06/19.
If you want to remain anonymous and not post through personal social media accounts, I
recommend looking to Reddit as an answer. There are a lot of different subreddits you can follow,
such as r/BlackLivesMatter, r/GirlGames, r/ClimateActionPlan, and so many others. Pretty much
any cause you care about, there is a subreddit!
If you really do not want to post at all, you can draft up artifacts (example: draft a IG story and take
a screenshot, or write a Facebook post in a Word Document file) and just use those in your
reflection. A large part of digital activism is sharing, but I also understand this may come with a lot
of stress.
Digital Activism Artifacts
For your digital activism, you will obviously want to choose a cause. Because of the current Black
Lives Matter movement, I highly recommend this cause. There are also sub-causes in BLM, such as
#BlackInTheIvory and defunding police. The more specific, the better!
You will also want to choose a particular purpose to post. Are you trying to educate, create an
intimate screen, disrupt someone/an organization, or another purpose?
Finally, you will choose your method of digital activism. This will be the actual way you reach your
purpose to perform digital activism of your cause. Here are some suggestions (you can choose
multiple of these, of course):
● Create a Twitter bot to disrupt harmful/racist hashtags, such as #WhiteLivesMatter
● Find an online fan community and engage in conversations around race, gender, and forms
of discrimination or misrepresentation in the particular community or larger cultural
material
● Post a story on Instagram or Facebook about this cause (if you have multiple pages for one
story, each page counts as one artifact)
ENG 2850: Writing for Social Media
Cara Marta Messina
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Create or remix memes
Engage with a particular digital activism hashtag on Twitter or Instagram
A post on Facebook about your cause
Collect Tweets from a particular hashtag to archive them. Please email me if you want to
do this because we will need to discuss ethics and logistics
Create a video for YouTube or TikTok on a particular topic
Create infographics or posts sharing information using Canva or a similar user-friendly
design platform
Here are other ways for “storytelling” on social media that you can also use for digital
activism: https://buffer.com/resources/social-media-storytelling
Does reposting count? Merely reposting something will not be enough for this assignment. If you
want to repost something, you must add to it or contribute to it in some way. For example, if there
is an infographic you want to share with your followers on your Instagram story, in the next few
stories, write about what this infographic shows and why it is important.
Assignment Requirements
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BE RESPECTFUL. Digital activism comes with an awareness of the social and political
issues, as well as how your activism may impact others. If you are engaging in digital
activism, you are likely participating in a difficult conversation. Be cautious with how you
take up this activism, and maybe look up some bigger activists in the cause to see how they
engage?
Digital activism artifacts: You must compose and show at least three digital activism
artifacts that you c reated about one cause. You will put these artifacts in your reflection
piece.
○ If you created a Twitter bot, I would love to see your process, too! A Twitter bot will
count as all three digital artifacts, and you can show the different Tweets your bot
has published.
Reflection piece: Write a reflection (due Tuesday, 06/16 at 11:59pm EST on Canvas)
about your digital activism. In this reflection, you should:
○ Write between 800-1500 words
○ Artifacts: Link to or screenshot your different artifacts. Describe each artifact,
including your purpose, some of the choices you made in composing these artifacts,
your reasoning for posting it where you posted it (if you posted it), who your
intended audience was, and how others’ reacted (again, if you posted it).
○ Engage with at least 2 scholars: Engage with at least 2 scholars from our readings
this semester. This may be to define digital activism, discuss purposes, or explain
your own process.
○ Reflect: Reflect on the process of creating these artifacts and what you learned
about the composing process, digital activism, the cause you chose, and your
ENG 2850: Writing for Social Media
Cara Marta Messina
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methods. The reflection genre is a strange one, so I will describe some of the typical
aspects of a reflection genre here:
■ Describe a particular experience d
uring your composing process
■ Discuss or share your particular emotions about your composing process
■ Describe your personal beliefs and perspectives as well as how these
influenced your choices while composing
■ Show an awareness of difficulties by describing any challenges you faced
■ Demonstrate an awareness of other perspectives, like thinking through
theory or historical/political/social contexts
■ Describe lessons learned and/or how you might apply what you learned
from this digital activism in other situations
Peer “review”: You will only have one draft due, but I would still like you to read each
other’s work! I will be asking you to do one final peer “review,” providing feedback on both
the reflection piece and the artifacts, themselves. This will be due on Friday, 06/19.
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