Civic Engagement in Physical and Digital Public Space
On June 2, 2020, over 28 million Instagram accounts posted a black square for #BlackoutTuesday as an act of solidarity with ongoing protests against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (Monckton 2020). Throughout the summer, the Black Lives Matter Movement gained traction like never before by protesting not just in a physical public space but in a digital public space as well.
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Since the Greek Agora, public space has played a key role in the development of cities. They offer citizens places to meet and engage in meaningful discussion (Carmona et al. 2008). Around the world we have seen people from all walks of life come together in these spaces and use them to protest. People protest against their oppressive governments, against their political leaders for not doing enough to prevent climate change, against police violence, and march for their basic human rights. The rise of social media activism has led to a new way of protesting that can draw more attention to a movement, and involve people from all around the world that support the movement but could not otherwise be able to attend protests in person. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and now TikTok are reshaping how we amplify our voices and make change; these channels give ordinary people power beyond the public space as we have known previously. Social media platforms offer a complementary approach to civic engagement that can make involvement in protests and movements more accessible, and, thus, create a bigger impact. At physical protests, crowds often show up and march, waving their homemade picket signs, or participate in boycotts and sit-ins. People will echo chants and give
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Sarah Mawdsley
M.S. UP
speeches. Other times they will be silent. Despite what the media may have us believe, there is no wrong way to protest. At the end of the day, it is about being heard. Above all else, the significance of the place is the make or break feature of a protest. In Los Angeles, for example, low density has led to protests taking place on highways rather than in the city itself, because they block traffic and force people to acknowledge what is going on (Schwartzstein 2020). Social media offers us a new way of looking at the significance of place. With something as simple as a hashtag or mention, a small group, or even just one person, no matter where they are in the world can start a movement. In the summer of 2020, I watched social media accounts shift to be more civically active; sharing information and graphics from activists and writing captions that declared their political beliefs. I saw celebrities like Olympic Steeplechaser Colleen Quigley share their accounts with people of color for the day, to share their story with a different audience in “Pass the Mic” campaigns. It was inspiring to witness – social media giving rise to a new age of political and social activism. In 2011, when Occupy Wall Street protests began in New York, organizers turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness of the events and direct people to demonstrations. The hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, aided in the scaling of the protests, turning it into a national series of demonstrations (Tremayne 2013). People have been using social media platforms as a public space since the beginning of the digital age, but it has advanced significantly in the past decade; no longer used solely to provide information about active demonstrations, but as a stand alone protest itself, as we saw on June 2, 2020.
