Activism or Slacktivism? Online Political Engagement in Austria

Krems.
The next session at CeDEM 2011 starts with Christine Neumayer and Judith Schoßböck. Their interest is in political lurkers, especially in the Austrian context. There are already terms like slacktivism and clicktivism to describe very lightweight means of engaging people in political activism; all of this takes place across a media ecology ranging from the conventional mass media through social media to alternative media.

Political identity is now often shown through Facebook ‘likes’, and this is an online equivalent of wearing pins or t-shirts supporting specific causes; on the other end of the extreme are hackers or offline activists, for example. This can be described through a pyramid model of participation, ranging from mere interest through to forming an opinion, to discussion and distribution of information, to support of existing projects, to self-organisation, and finally through to reaction.

How this unfolds online is also related to wider discussions around ‘digital natives’, and so Christine and Judith started with a survey of kids of around 14 years of age in Austria – to examine the digital divide between pupils, the digital literacies of young users, and the level and nature of political engagement at this age.

Overall, there is very limited interest in politics at this level; boys were generally more involved than girls (who also started using computers about one year later than boys, in general), however, and pupils at higher-level schools were more involved than pupils at lower-level schools. Overall, 25% were generally interested in politics, and only 4% very interested.

Pupils were most likely to be interested in posting comments online, joining in online votes, joining social network groups, or writing blogs; offline actions included joining a demonstration or voting for student representatives. Wearing buttons, joining information stands, or handing out flyers were not of interest to them.

Search behaviours were also surveyed: the search terms used by students generally led them to social networking sites rather than sites with political information; they also had difficulties in processing the information they did find.

A second case examined by the research team were the ‘Unibrennt’ (‘uni burns’) student protests, in part through a study of the around 100,000 #unibrennt and #unsereuni tweets generated by students during October through December 2009. There was significant public attention to these events, including media coverage especially of the use of social media in organising them.

Lurkers (many using Twitter for the first time to follow and sometimes forward information) were especially important during these events; Unibrennt itself became a kind of brand in its own right, and the whole process can be described as a kind of flashmob. Whether it actually achieved anything is in doubt, however: there were few tangible political outcomes of these protects, in the end.

Is this really activism, then, or just slacktivism which generates good feelings but few results? We can see how many people ‘support’ (as in, ‘like’ on Facebook) specific causes, but what do we make of this? If this is subactivism, as Maria Bakardjieva has called it, how do we build the bridge from here to political activism, to political action? How do we connect these digitally literate participants to those with more limited access, literacy, or education?