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Social media has become an essential tool for activists wishing to reach as many people as possible. But have other forms of campaigning been overlooked in the process? We asked students whether social media was indeed a campaigners best friend or whether greater focus on grassroots activism was required. Below are five of our favourite responses.

Campaigners increasingly embrace online tools to get their messages across. Blogging sites, online personal or group profiles, and cyberspace are used to spread awareness about a campaign, interact with and motivate supporters to follow the campaign, and coordinate events. Tweets and likes make it easy for the campaigners to track their followers interaction and engagement, while flexibility in social networking gives a behind-the-scenes view of the campaign and consequently a sense of accessibility.

But campaigns also involve a degree of mobilisation and a deeper level of participation that requires relational ties of some kind (as well as individual agency and ability). Thus, campaigning demands an element of fellowship solidarity and companionship that characterise a more personal form of contact.

For me, one of the best strategies is meeting and pressurising decision-makers to commit to change; it adds a more relational perspective to the campaign and ensures devotion to the cause.

Social media has changed the way we campaign. It is the ultimate equaliser giving people the chance to have their voices heard on the same stage as the worlds most powerful leaders. In the past decade weve seen online campaigning help bring down dictators, hold big business to account, elect presidents and encourage a whole new generation of young people to get involved in issues that matter. Of course, this is not to say that social media does not have its downsides, and the same tools that can be used for good can also be used to bully and oppress. But for campaigners to ignore this new platform would be equivalent to ignoring the rise of print media so many years ago. This is simply the way we communicate today, and I believe its still possible to maintain grassroots elements of campaigning in this new world. Campaigning on the streets is important, but there really is no comparison to the amount of people activists can reach online. So yes, social media is still a campaigners best friend.

The encompassing force of globalisation is facilitating a movement towards an online world characterised by the rapid sharing of social media information, which has the power to transcend traditional boundaries. However, is it possible to create significant change from an online platform? How can politicians be appropriately engaged? These are questions that cloud the effectiveness of such far-reaching campaigning. Undoubtedly, social media can be used as an effective tool for advocating change, but quality grassroots campaigning should be used as a catalyst for mobilising the vast quantity of keyboard warriors.

Take the poignant UN speech by Emma Watson regarding gender equality, which inspired 19m hits for he4she.org in the four days following. Social media requires a spark to become effective; lazy keyboard warriors need a real-life catalyst to inspire their virtual campaign. A further prominent example is the public self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, which created a wave of revolutionary unrest throughout the Arab world in 2011, mobilising 2 million Egyptians in occupying Tahrir Square [and] overthrowing Mubaraks government. It began with Bouazizi and was spread thanks to the sharing of a multitude of accessible information, photos, videos and locations of imminent protests.

Clearly, social media can be employed as a significant tool for empowerment and liberation, yet the online world is a gullible and impatient one; mistakes will doubtless be made. Nonetheless, social media represents the future of campaigning, so long as the sparks that mobilise the clicktivists continue.

As a means of communication, advertisement, and expression, social media has become the norm. Many young people, in the developed and developing world alike, often have an arguably unhealthy attachment to their mobile device, as opportunities to socialise, research, and express oneself to the world through written word, recorded video, and carefully cropped pictures are a mere swipe of the finger away. Therefore, social media is pivotal to a grassroots campaign in regard to organisation, promotion, recruitment, policy and strategy briefing, and indoctrination of specific goals and beliefs.

-theguardian.com

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Social media and grassroots action