On-line engagement: more than a tick or a like?

The rise of social media platforms has changed political engagement in complicated ways. Dismissed as clicktivism and slacktivism by the way it affords ill-informed and non-committal support from digital passers-by, it nonetheless furnishes movements with potent organisational infrastructures, and makes possible global visibility as well as the emergence of affective publics: collectivities coalescing around moods as much as anything but capable of pushing for and achieving change IRL. Recursive virality means that indignation and rage can combine with whimsy and joy in newly expressive ways, but it can equally render expressions of political engagement ersatz and flimsy. Visibility is a double-edged sword, too, with movements like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion wielding little control over how they are seen by well-meaning naifs and inveterate partisans. Nor is online activism leaderless or self-organising: it is often as hierarchical and exclusionary as any pre-digital sclerotic factionalism. Online engagement demands as much work as what preceded it, and much of that work is material, physical. Indeed, one of the great ironies of digital activism is how it facilitates and amplifies real-world interventions, enabling social movements to ground their claims in a collective, corporeal insistence that we are here and we will be heard.