I understand the value of mobilization and awareness, but I also understand the critiques of "clicktivism" or "slactivism." I think the better, less judgmental term is "hashtag activism," as used by Bonilla and Rosa 2015, #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnogrpahy, and the racial politics of social media in the United States (not sure if this link is behind a paywall or not). But then again, a former student of mine who this time last year was a viral photo and BLM activist is now a Charlotte City Council Member, having received the second-highest number of votes for an at-large seat this past Tuesday. How do we understand the continuum between hashtag and 'real' activism?

I've taught both the Boellstorff and Nardi ethnographies in my digital anthropology class (http://digital.anthro-seminars.net/), and I'm very conscious of the ephemerality of cyberspace (itself a term that is less commonly used nowadays). This semester, while we didn't read the whole books, they read articles by Boellstorff - I had to explain what Second Life was, show them the trailer of Life 2.0, and it still seemed to the students like a far-off, historical way of living, as exotic as the Amish.

I taught a blended learning class that used the edX platform to bring together a class from Wellesley College and a class from Davidson College. It was not the most successful experiment, in that I felt there was more flaming between the students on different campuses than there was collaboration. One important lesson, though, was that the platform we chose to bring them together was not a 'native' platform for our students. If we had started out on GroupMe or some other popular social media platform that the students' already used, we may have had more success in bringing young people from two campuses together.

I talked about this issue today in class today, but the way I phrased the question was "Does a hashtag make a community?" (They read Caliandro 2017). While I understand how digital citizenship can create an affective community, one that could mobilize people to create political change, the political anthropologist in me wants more IRL engagement. But perhaps empathy is the necessary precondition for social change.

This location will have the latest handouts, not moodle.