The Case for Digital Activism: Refuting the Fallacies of Slacktivism

Digital technologies have enabled a wider breadth of political participation. The barriers to participate and share political material, and to activate be part of wider political action has been significantly lowered. However, this lowered threshold seems to have brought with it a discussion of what level of activity should be required of political participation. To critics of online political participation the effortlessness of signaling political stances is easily criciised and forms part of a wider critique of the slackers using digtal technology. This slacker activism has been readily denigrated as slacktivism. The goal of this paper is to challenge this derrogative designation. By comparing online and offline activism this paper argues that tthe term does not bring a substantive argument to the discussion of the role of technology in online political participation, but rather is a form of digital discrimination where those uttering the term are more negative towards the potential of technology than aware of it's formative role in the shaping of the activist persona.