A New Dialect For Social Change: Is #Fighting For Justice Enough?
As 2017 came to a close, many reflected upon the past year’s events through the hashtags that dominated social media platforms, from showing support to victims of terrorist attacks to social issues – notably against sexual harassment. Hashtags have provided global audiences with the ideal platform to participate in the ‘big conversations’ taking place online. Now that the hashtag is the dominant social logarithm harnessing and transmitting opinions on a global scale, unifying our social spheres, it’s easy to forget that the hashtag (on social media) is only ten years old. Born on August 23rd 2007, when Chris Messina, a product designer at Google, used Twitter to test run the hashtag, tweeting: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” referring to a popular event in the tech industry. According to Messina, this innovation was “the simplest idea that could work” – allowing people to “participate in a powerful way on social media” – and powerful it has proven to be.
Ten years later, Twitter generates 125 million hashtags a day, and it’s fair to say that Messina unwittingly created a medium that has, according to New York Times writer Matt Stevens, “infiltrated our vernacular, aggregated conversations […] and [in the opinion of some] filled screens with unnecessary, meaningless garble.”
#MeToo: A force for good
The hashtag has undoubtedly served to generate online activism in times of political and social fracture. Not only does it provide an immediate counterbalance to divisive politics and policies, but also offers a unique platform, bringing individuals together around a common interest, allowing them to participate directly in social and political issues which concern them.
Furthermore, popular hashtags become news. The momentum they gain is capable of elevating issues to national and even global levels of awareness, without which they might have been sidelined or left out of the global news cycle altogether. Once a hashtag is trending globally, there is little wiggle room for international media commentators to ignore the issue. Forced into the discussion, they must acknowledge its importance and respond, or be seen as ‘falling behind’, out-of-touch or worse, unreceptive to matters of public concern.
Journalism Professor at the University of Southern California Robert Hernandez highlights the wonders of hashtags in uniting a community in real time: “Only because of a hashtag [#yesallwomen],” hundreds of thousands are engaged in a global discussion on violence against women, sharing their own experiences about sexual harassment and abuse, or #blacklivesmatter which became a powerful instrument for the black community in raising their voice in the fight against systemic racial oppression.
Time’s person(s) of the year, “the Silence Breakers”, are women who brought about the downfall of powerful men, from Hollywood to news outlets to the government, who have engaged in serial sexual harassment or assault. They owe their success to the hashtag, #MeToo, that made their movement an online global sensation. When it started making waves halfway through October 2017, following allegations against Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein, no one predicted that it would garner over 3.2 million tweets, or that 4.7 million Facebook users would enter the conversation. The hashtag was derived from the “Me Too” Movement which was founded a decade earlier by social activist Tarana Burke who had built a career working with victims of sexual assault. However, it only became an online sensation when Alyssa Milano tweeted on October 15th, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” The next morning, Milano woke to 30,000 #MeToo tweets, initially springing from the media and entertainment industries, then subsequently cutting across all walks of life and backgrounds.
The #MeToo movement has now left a trail of notable male figures in its wake, exposing some to public condemnations, destroying others’ professional and personal reputations, and in some instances, costing them their lucrative jobs and projects, as in the cases of Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis C.K. and Congressman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan. The toppling of some of the entertainment and media industries’ most renowned and respected showmen was not lost on the public, as it demonstrated the impact a hashtag movement can have in dramatically altering internal structures and providing the impetus for change.
However, the #MeToo movement also demonstrated the complexities and internal contradictions of the hashtag dialect, having provoked the formation of other trends in response. These included the hashtags #ItWasMe and #IHave, devised for perpetrators to come forward with their own experiences of complacency or inflicting of sexual assault and harassment. These hashtags were not met with the same reception, having been criticized for using social media to “trivialize and compound the damage done” by perpetrators. While #MeToo provided women with an unprecedented platform that would transform an isolated personal tragedy into a universally shared grievance, it also created the platform through which perpetrators could hide behind the masses that could somehow collectivize their individual crimes. In other words, “the megaphone of social media can’t be used to ask the many for the forgiveness that only one person can give.”
The downside
But in spite of these ground-breaking achievements, the question remains: is a hashtag enough to spur real, concrete, sustainable change?
The New Yorker columnist Louis Menand argues that the ‘Word of the Year’ is “not a word at all,” remarking on the dialectical shift occurring not only within the social media sphere but within political spheres. While some may support the current ‘communicative mode’ as one that promotes freedom of expression, broadening participation in discussions and creating an environment of non-exclusion, others highlight the “loss of ambiguity and complexity” that may be causing more harm than good. Menand stresses that by its nature, language as “a common […] resource that we share is vulnerable to impoverishment, manipulation, weaponization, co-optation, and distortion.”
Consequently, just as a hashtag can be used to globalize a serious political moment or represent a genuine political movement, it can also be used to spread trivial and frivolous matters, creating in the words of Hernandez, “hashtag pollution.” The hashtag, therefore, condemns the politically and socially significant to exist in the same realm as the inconsequential trivial obsessions of the masses, which one could argue contributes to the ‘mediocritization’ of social conscious. As Robert Musil eloquently puts it in his seminal work The Man Without Qualities: “If, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are automatically reinforced while unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increasingly mediocre this explains why, despite the thousand-fold possibilities available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average.”
Hernandez emphasizes that the essence of the hashtag exists precisely in the lack of demarcation or boundary separating substance from the unsubstantial. According to Messina, this ultimately gives “humanity a way to express themselves – as incoherent as it may be.”
Even former President Barack Obama, is somewhat disillusioned by the power of the hashtag, stating in an interview with Prince Harry that “raising a hashtag itself is not a way of bringing about change.” He argues that the problem with the online community is that they exist and persist in virtual realities, failing to “move offline” to become genuine citizen action movements. Having said that, Obama was the first Presidential candidate to fully harness the power of social media as part of his ultimately successful campaign strategy. So naturally, he recognizes that social media has undoubtedly become a global platform where “people of common interests [can] convene and get to know each other and connect”– but he stresses the importance for these encounters and discussions to reproduce themselves in offline realities and warns that what people might find simple on the internet may turn out complicated in person.
Another frequently mentioned critique of the hashtag movement is its capacity to universalize a topic and then have it disappear as rapidly as it appeared. However, it is worth asking whether the impermanence of a hashtag is what gives it its global appeal. Is it the inconsequential yet consequential act of retweeting a pound sign followed by a few words that entices someone to partake in a global movement? The Atlantic notes that the impact of a hashtag trend such as #MeToo is in its ability to take “something that women have long kept quiet about and transform it into a movement.” While its effect might not appear as tangible as other forms of social-media activism, #MeToo was “an attempt to get people to understand the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society […] to get women and men to raise their hands.” In the end, the potency of a hashtag to open the floodgates for real steps to be taken occurs when it demonstrates its relevance through the magnitude of the public reception it receives. While many question the sustained impact of a hashtag movement, one could argue that “uncovering the colossal scale of the problem is revolutionary in its own right.”
While the #MeToo hashtag campaign provided a platform for women to share and confront their personal grievances in solidarity with other victims, some have questioned the usefulness of the campaign, wherein “what began […] as well-intentioned encouragement to deal with any personal shame […] transformed eventually into a slick and meaningless catchphrase that puts the burden on the sufferers to heal themselves without any resources.” As the writer Megan Nolan notes, “It’s natural, this inclination to want to know […] but it still makes me feel a little nauseous, the zeal with which we absorb the horror […] Awareness of the scale of abuse does not address these problems […] Nothing less than the dismantling of our current systems […] will compel the sweeping change we so badly need to see.”
In a similar vein, Pakistani writer Ashgar remarks on the recent outpouring on social media regarding the death of an eight year-old minor in Punjab, stating that, as in the cases of the hashtags that have preceded #JusticeForZainab, “all of this will die down in a day or two, […] there will be new hashtags, perhaps in a day or two, on a new chaos or a disaster that we will experience” and that the forever-online social world will pipe up to claim as its own. “People will word their emotions, on […] Facebook walls and Twitter timelines,” contributing once more to our ever-shrinking attention span as “each new day brings a new hashtag of some other injustice or atrocity,” while “the previous one remains unresolved and the new one is added to the ever-growing list.”
What Nolan and Ashgar both criticize is not the outward display of collective unity and support that are conveyed with every hashtag protesting an isolated crime or commemorating one that has been born by millions. Rather, the writers wish to demystify the illusion that mass outcry can deliver justice to victims, much less correct entrenched societal structures that maintain or reinforce the perpetration of these crimes. Their purpose is to emphasize that instead of sensationalizing catchy phrases and new terminology that will linger only momentarily in the social sphere, we should examine the effect routinization of hashtags is having on the collective response to heinous crimes. Is it perhaps just nourishing an impulse to share and repost which eats away at any capacity to address the real and underlying issues?
Today, we seem to live in a world where cries for justice appear to sound louder simply because of the scale they reach in the public’s awareness. Ironically, perhaps it is their globalized and sensationalized nature which has diminished their ability to last in the human consciousness. For as soon as the horror, disgust or rage has been aired, it is as good as spent, leaving the collective to thirst for a new cause to rail against the ugliness in the world, for the cycle to repeat and for another triumphant hashtag to turn the last one into a mere echo.
Edited by Sarie Khalid
