I’ve seen the word “activists” used in this manner to describe a certain type of person, who in my mind hardly qualifies as an activist. At most they are a person who follows the day to day of our political theater, but I doubt they could point to a single policy or proposal they actually advocated for in any political forum.
Coding behavior this way is misleading and counterproductive. Activism is a generally respectable activity, it entails actually showing up and giving your time towards something you care about, not just lecturing people about watching cable news.
Twenty years ago such people would have been (disparagingly) referred to as “keyboard warriors” by “boots on the ground” activists. I haven’t come across the “keyboard warriors” term in a long time – most likely because the online “activists” vastly outnumber the activists who don’t confine their political activity to the online sphere.
I get your point, but isn't this kind of a no true scotsman thing? Social media has a lot of people thinking that they are activists because they have a hashtag in their twitter name or post black squares on instagram. What would you call those people? They call themselves activists, or they at least call those activities activism.
If I had written the comment you replied to, I would have put the word in quotes. Some people use the term "slacktivist", but I think terms like that are silly. And to be clear, I'm with you - when I think of an activist, I think of someone collecting signatures door-to-door, or organizing an irl event, etc. I think of someone actually trying to accomplish something rather than just signaling virtue. But I also think that if enough people use a word a certain way, that's what the word means, and a lot of people seem to think that "just lecturing people" counts as activism.
My assumption is that parent comment was applying that label well beyond the group that labels themselves as such. Social media activism can still be activism. I’m not looking to gatekeep.
Given the context of this forum, people really love to throw this and other similar terms around in a way that reads as a pejorative. Basically, “people with a specific type of politics that I don’t like and who annoy me”. Ex. Elons “I support the current thing” tweet.
> I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.
Exactly. There's almost nothing in the daily news that someone must have "privilege" not to care about. They have some articles about social issues that might fit that description, but that's a totally different thing than the news itself.
One thing I've observed, though, is that "the news" generally isn't how I get information about what fun, brave, new world people would like to make for us.
"The news", qua the comercially-produced mass media doings of the day, generally has never talked about issues important to me and mine and when they do it's largely Fox punditry or it's reaction.
I get a lot of information about the things I care about via various instagram folks and then following up by cursory searches to gt the larger picture.
But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.
> But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.
Oh certainly. There was a survey a while ago (which I can't find) that found that reading UK rightwing press was correlated with being less informed about issues than simply not reading news at all - i.e. readers would underperform random guessing on multiple choice questions.
I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.
Exactly. It's like when people complain about minimum wage. As a software developer, this will likely never impact me. Same thing with issues like abortion or gay rights. As a straight male, I gain nothing from getting bogged down in pointless arguments over those side-shows. Russian invading Ukraine? Why is that something I need to know about? I live in American, not Ukraine.
People like me just don't need to worry about these types of issues, so what do I gain by reading news about things like that?
One possibility would be if you had a girlfriend or wife, the new anti-abortion laws would fairly directly impact you as well by limiting your family planning options depending on where you live.
If your wife happens to be pregnant, there are also states you might choose to avoid because she might need medical care if she miscarries late term, and doctors in those states might choose not to save her life for fear that the authorities might try to prosecute them for the loss of the baby.
I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.