Purpose of this Blog

I want to uncover the history of #activism, analyze its effectiveness, and discuss how it might be used as a tool for public interest litigation organizations. Hopefully these posts will add some value to your understanding of these topics as well as my own. I welcome comments and will likely be trying some posts that require online community participation, so I hope I get some!

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Advocacy Organizations in the US Political Process

Andrews and Edwards write in their literature review about advocacy organizations that about the role of networks in legal advocacy organizations. This scholarship is relevant to our understanding of how social media can impact legal advocacy organizations. “There is an inverse relationship between social homophily and networked access to resources whereby the like-attracts-like principle of homophily leads advocacy groups over time to develop more homogeneous memberships that leave them relatively isolated from the surrounding social structure. Network relations can also provide access to key resources needed to sustain advocacy (Lin 2001). Advocacy groups that choose to have organizational members formalize network ties and create institutionalized ties through which resources can be shared. Diverse organizational leaders or participants can provide connections beyond the advocacy organization, thus establishing weak ties that broaden the movement’s capacity (Ganz 2000
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Hope in a Hashtag

Clark writes about the #WhyIStayed movement and discusses how that movement has co ntributed to feminism discourse and feminism in social media. She also highlights other studies done about that she terms “hashtag feminism” and social media activism including: Higgs, Eleanor T. 2015. “#JusticeforLiz: Power and Privilege in Digital Transnational Women’s Rights Activism.” Feminist Media Studies 15 (2): 344–347 Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. 2013. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Hottest 100 Women’: Cross-Platform Discursive Activism in Feminist Blogging Networks.” Australian Feminist Studies 27 (74): 373–387. All these articles may also be of some use to the insights of my paper. However Clark’s study, which analyzed randomly selected #WhyIStayed tweets published between September 8 and September 30, 2014 using the Annenberg Twitter Project at
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#activisim has a Wikipedia page

  I often think in today’s society Wikipedia is a pretty good measure of relevance. If “pictures or it didn’t happen” is a thing, then certainly it is also true that “Wikipedia or it doesn’t exist” is also a thing. If someone asks a question about a place, topic, event, or often even a person, and google doesn’t return a Wikipedia page in the first few results you start to wonder: if that pace or event is real, wouldn’t it be on Wikipedia? But I digress, the point is while this is often how we think, that does not mean it is always a valid thought, especially when it comes to emerging trends or ideas. But I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Hashtag Activism does in fact have its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag_activism , and it is pretty informative. It includes information on the history, stating “the oldest known mention of the term is from The Guardian  in 2011,” noteable examples, including #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNOMore, #NODAPL and #YesAllWomen,
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