Blog Post #2

     After taking a look at the social media use of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, it is apparent that the group very much falls into the category of "slacktivism" that Gladwell discusses in his article, at least in the case of their social media usage.

     As a group that started in the 1970's, Friends of the Earth started on Gladwell's ideal kind of social activism, the kind where people would go out and picket, group together and sign petitions, old fashioned kind of lobbying. With the advent of media technology, as a prominent environmental activist group Friends of the Earth wanted to get in the social media game in order to attract a wider group of people to their cause. In the case of one of their largest social media endeavors, Twitter, FoE's activism tends to fall into the category of slacktivism.

     As seen above, rather than actually grouping people to a cause of doing any kind of hard activism, FoE uses their twitter posts to links to their articles, and keep their followers in the loop on the news surrounding the goings-on of the environmental group.

     However, contrary to Gladwell's harsh take on the role of slacktivism nowadays, I believe that FoE's twitter outings, though not an example of hard activism, they do succeed in their goal of gathering a larger group of people together towards their cause. Even though their posts about articles or news in the group doesn't necessarily rally anyone to take up arms against environmental aggressors, the lack of hard activism apparent in their social outings makes people more likely to want to be involved in any way that they can. And if even one of those people they attracted with their "slacktivist" social media decides to join the core group in their outings of hard activism, then the social media was a complete success. In this way, while slacktivism may not get anything significant done, it facilitates the continuation of the hard activism that Gladwell is so in support of.