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Introduction
The Grassroots movement is closely interrelated to the notion of activism. Their resemblance is found in the desire for a decisive change within a certain social reality. Grassroot movements are comprised of individual activists uniting over a shared social concern to spread awareness of the issue, organize those with similar grievances, and advocate solutions to the problem. The modern example of a grassroots movement can be considered the case of Fridays for the Future. The campaign was launched by the Swedish girl Gretha Thunberg whose influence sharply rose to have an iconic impact on environmental activists globally. This case demonstrates several developments in the organization of activists, in particular the importance of social media in the operation of external and internal structures of activists. Along with the increasing power of individual activists to progress a grassroots movement to a global movement through the utilization of social media and ultimately create social change.
This paper will discuss the relationship between grassroots movements and activists and its modern illustration in Fridays for the Future; The development of Fridays for the Future as an international phenomenon; The role of new and old media in the progression of activist agenda, in particular the multifunctional nature of social media. Limitations and constraints of social media that point to the vulnerability and limited accessibility of the technology. Ultimately it can be considered that the role of social media in contemporary activism and the case of Fridays for the Future is immense. Despite the visible drawbacks in the face of the commodification of internet space and the government control over it.
Relationship between grassroots movements and activists
The influence of normal citizens without any political power is insignificant when the goal is to create momentum for a decisive change in the political system, environmental awareness, or economy. The campaigning for change is filled with the struggle to see any real progress towards the aims of those individual citizens. Their voices do not reach people with political or economic power. As a result, those individuals form groups with aligned interests, passion, and conviction to reach a certain goal that is bound to bring change into society. Often, these activist movements are established by individuals that a concerned about the issues in tight communities and are willing to contribute from the bottom-up. Frequently, the cause is personal for the activists and occurs in their community. However, the change brought by the globalization of communication coupled with the development of international difficulties such as climate change expanded the scope of these activist movements.
Currently, there are two forms of apartheid surrounding the global discourse. The academy utilizes globalization as the means to conduct internal debates on such issues as recognition, representation, the history finale, and others (Appadurai, 2020). In the study of Appadurai, these debates were described as narrow and petite or, in other words, parochial. Consequently, they form the first apartheid the separation of these discussions from those that attribute to the global which is often occupied with how to plausibly protect cultural autonomy and economic survival in some local, national, or regional sphere in the era of reform and openness (Appadurai, 2020, p. 2-3). The second apartheid refers to the exclusion of the poor and their advocates from the national discourse on the topic of globalization as well as discourse on trade, labor, healthcare, warfare, and environmental policies (Appadurai, 2020). The emergence of grassroots movement was the barrier that contested, interrogated, and reversed the development of apartheid.
Today, a grassroots movement is an international phenomenon that helps to rid the world of the exclusion of certain social casts. This social form allows the spread of awareness and social mobilization to act without being bound to the actions of corporate capital and the nation-state system (Appadurai, 2020). Therefore, it is seen as an act towards globalization from below or grassroots globalization as it helps to achieve an international civil society without having any political or economic power (Appadurai, 2020). Moreover, the development in communication systems greatly contributes to achieving the political and or social agenda of such movements, especially among the younger generation.
In the late 1980s, Chinese students in the US created a newsgroup Social Culture China (SCC), and exploited the university discussion systems and email to effectively organize a group with nationwide reach and the ability to orchestrate lobbying of Congress in search of protection from reprisal in China (Boncheck, 1995). This example is one of the initial versions of activism through social media. The latest examples could be considered online hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #SchoolStrike4Climate or #FridaysForTheFuture that received worldwide resonance. The later hashtag is a campaign introduced by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg that was led by youths to oppose the actions of older generations that harm the environment (Boulianne et al., 2020). The strike was supported by 1.4 million young protesters to address the issue of climate change and call for action (Boulianne et al., 2020). It can be viewed as the most extensive and widespread grassroots movements of the 21st century.
Background of Fridays for the Future
Fridays for the future was the response of fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg towards the record wildfires that emerged in 2018, Sweeden. On August 20, 2018, Thunberg sat in front of the Swedish parliament, started to protest, and draw attention to the climate crisis with the sign that read school strike for climate. She was against attending school until the general election day of September 9, the same year. Her lone strike, within 24 hours, garnered attention and was shared tens of thousands of times across social media, soon followed by more traditional forms of media such as print and broadcast. The strike began to grow in Sweden as more people joined the movement, and soon Thunberg established Fridays for the Future, which was an organized movement for school children to skip school on Friday to protest the inaction on climate change mitigation.
In a video shared on Twitter, Thunberg invited students to join in a school walkout until the climate action was achieved. The video was viewed more than 9 million times by a global audience gaining attraction for the grassroots movement that started with one person. Internet media fueled the movement after Thunberg spoke at Conference of the Parties (COP) 24 held in December of 2018. Thunbergs speech went viral, inspiring and empowering activists around the globe to join the movement, which grew to more than 17,000 students in more than 24 countries by January 2019.
By March 2019, Thunberg was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize as the movement Nobel Peace Prize March 2019 as the movement grew further to over a million people across 135 countries.
The political involvement of youth in democratic countries is a subject of widespread concern. Their participation is ad hoc, issue-oriented, non-electoral, and personalized (Boulianne et al., 2020). Nevertheless, such political activism of the young generation can influence the government and policymaking as it was seen in the case of the Fridays for the Future. Greta Thunberg became an international icon for climate activism as she became an inspiration for concerned teenagers and those who previously were not interested in her agenda. Some studies point out that Austrias Green Party received an increase of 10% votes due to the actions of Thunberg (Jung et al., 2020). Furthermore, the Popular British music band Cold play paused their world tour in order to reach a sustainable way to perform (Jung et al., 2020). This points out the immense importance of media in the success and influence of the grassroots movement.
The role of media in relation to grassroots movements
Social media is the technology that bloomed with the development of the world wide web or Internet. It encompasses the tools to share and exchange ideas and information through virtual networks and online communities built around the same ideas and thoughts (Cammaerts, 2015). Social media is available globally as the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible even in the low-developed regions. The ability to connect people with low-cost and immediate information sharing attracted numerous traditional media giants. Newspapers, TV channels, and governments operate both online and offline.
Various internet protocols enable the communicative practices of social media platforms. Two kinds of protocols enact the common emails Post Office Protocol (POP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) (Cammaerts, 2015). Telnet protocol is used to virtually access a computer and to provide one-to-one or few-to-few connections to Internet Relay Chats (IRC) (Cammaerts, 2015). File Transfer Protocol (FTP) provides the ability to send and receive digital files (Cammaerts, 2015). These were followed by Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enabling website development and the World Wide Web. Weblogs, social networking sites, podcasting, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and streaming services complement these protocols, enabling additional practices (Cammaerts, 2015). Moreover, as the network infrastructure is becoming more developed, the internet capabilities to provide more real-time experiences are expanding.
Activists exploit social media for effective use in different internal and external operations. Internal operations include organization, coordination, internal debate, and decision-making (Cammaerts, 2015). The utilization of social media platforms is efficient in terms of participation and the transaction costs, which partially contributes to the entollment and retention of participants (Cammaerts, 2015). It also features fluid membership and asynchronous participation, but with the growing importance of face-to-face communications in the establishment of trust, it is difficult to differentiate the positive effects of such features (Cammaerts, 2015). Moreover, the cost-effectiveness of social networks is not directly attributable to higher levels of political participation (Cammaerts, 2015). Nevertheless, the organization of grassroots movements through social media goes hand in hand with the increase in the ability to organize across borders. It means they operate on a transnational level and can potentially cooperate with different organizations to make large networks not bound by time and space constraints, with potential for a movement spill-over (Cammaerts, 2015).
External operations relate to mobilization, recruitment, attack strategies and the creation of alternative or independent channels of communication that contribute to a vibrant public sphere (Cammaerts, 2015). Social medias impact on the mobilization and coordination of group actions and movements offline is enormous. The applications for in-real-time communicative practices of social media can be attributed to the resignation of Philippine President Joseph Estrada (Cammaerts, 2015). Short messaging services along with mobile phones had a major role in mobilizations against him and illustrated the shift in political communication and mobilization in the Global South (Cammaerts, 2015). Social media is also used as a weapon against ideological enemies, and the term for such practices is coined as hacktivism (Cammaerts, 2015).
Sousveillance can be considered as the illustration of a passive-aggressive hacktivist counter-tactic. It refers to the usage of technology for surveillance of governmental or public figures (Cammaerts, 2015). Through filming, broadcasting, and or taking photos of police agents during protests or demonstrations, activists may reveal and monitor state-sponsored or police violence (Cammaerts, 2015). Protesters upload this kind of content to social media which in return may attract a broader audience online, especially international media (Cammaerts, 2015). This tactic had significant importance during several protests of students in the United Kingdom as well as the Arab Spring (Cammaerts, 2015). In addition, the results of sousveillance may act as symbolic content related to the protests, tactics, organizations, and ideas (Cammaerts, 2015). Social media acts as an archive or a repository of numerous such instances. Due to the perpetual nature of such collective memory, it is preserved and passed on to the following generations of activists with the symbolic artifacts embedded in these discourses (Cammaerts, 2015).
Traditional media consists of two parts print and broadcast media. Print media is the source of information that followed a major part of human history, society, and culture. It involves but is not limited to the production of newspapers, magazines, and journals. The information is delivered through hard-copy mediums and meant to be read. They allow great attention to detail and space for the extensive definition of the issues delivered through it. At the same time, broadcast media has developed into its current form fairly recently after the discovery of electricity. It allows both audio and visual interpretation of the data distributed. Typical examples of mediums for this media type are television and radio, but they have a disadvantage in the form of the limited broadcasting time.
Even though modern media platforms are not limited by such constraints, many CSOS or civil society organizations are conscious that the application of the Internet is burdened by difficulties of access and fragmentation. Moreover, older generations prefer these media platforms due to their familiarity with that particular type of technology. Nonetheless, in activism, print media lost its power as the primary tool for eliciting enjoying and imploring engagement with various activist causes (Schreiber, 2016, p. 1). However, a combination of media types is still used to report daily issues and aid in the promotion of activist agendas.
How individual actors use social media to progress grassroots movements in general and more specifically in Fridays for the Future
Although other forms of media such as broadcasting and printing are not diminishing in popularity or relevance, they are not as direct or efficient when it comes to information sharing. The significance of information sharing as the type of inter-organizational cooperation is high. Many researchers are convinced that it provides decision-makers with the necessary guidance and evidence upon which to base decisions and improve the efficiency and efficacy of operations. These kinds of interactions act as a backbone for transnational knowledge networks. Numerous actors participate in the development of these networks and extract the knowledge from shared sources to address the mutual concern. In the case of Fridays for the Future, these actors are students across the globe concerned with the policies of environmental protection and their effectiveness.
Social media encompasses a wide variety of platforms and an even broader community of users, including celebrities, entrepreneurs, politicians, and laypeople. Governmental representatives such as presidents and members of the monarchy also actively use it for their personal and or political interests. It is an aggregate for modern globalization of communication as it aims to connect people. Social media is seen as a convenient and effective source of information (Jung et al., 2020). The research of Shearer and Grieco demonstrated that approximately 55% of adults in the US utilize social media as a news source. However, the vast majority of news consumers are concerned about bias and inaccurateness present in this type of media (Jung et al., 2020). Almost 50% of them are prone to think that the bias is more liberal than conservative (Jung et al., 2020). Twitter, in terms of social network demographics, is considerably balanced in terms of gender and age. It encourages users to share their latest news; hence it is often employed as a news source and reporting. Journalists regularly incorporate the information shared on Twitter as the source of news items (Jung et al., 2020). General practice in the expansion of issues on Twitter is as follows.
First of all, users start to follow other accounts to create a social network. They exploit these networks to extract and distribute information. This practice allows to share the social activities of the users friends with their own followers. Furthermore, retweeting allows to easily share exact copies of the content. Hence users may use someone elses self-expression to link to their own (Jung et al., 2020). Therefore, the distribution of any issue is not dependent solely on individuals disseminating their own ideas (Jung et al., 2020). This is what makes social media an affordable and effective tool to spread awareness, share information, and unite parties with a shared interest.
Twitter as the microblogging site also helps to facilitate the cooperation of public, private, and non-governmental organizations as each of them created Twitter accounts. However, a shared language is an essential factor that affects whether these organizations sought out each others messages (Wukich et al., 2017). The trend towards communication with an organization with the language and presence in close geographic location leads to the establishment of regional clusters that limit the transnational knowledge networks ability for the expansion of critical information (Wukich et al., 2017). However, Twitter and other platforms for social networking are partially disintegrating these barriers with the integration of translation options (Wukich et al., 2017). This presumably partially contributed to facilitate such massive cooperation of activists around the world and achieve the multinational impact of Fridays for the Future.
Ultimately the discussions on online platforms have a limited lifespan in their popularity. In the study of Jung et al. (2020), it was revealed that among the discussions surrounding Gretha Thunberg, ten events demonstrated a remarkable peak of tweets with an average lifespan of eight days. One of such events was the globalization of the school strike started by Thunberg, which rapidly attracted numerous followers and generated a similarly large number of tweets (Jung et al., 2020). Although, the influence of hashtags surrounding Fridays for the Future are difficult to summarize due to the varying spellings such as #FridayforFuture or usage of the number 4 instead of for (Boulianne et al., 2020). Nevertheless, the scope of the event is evident in the number of supporters of the cause.
Counterargument
Despite the prominent role that media played in progressing a grassroots movement started by one activist into a movement spanning the globe, there were limitations to the role that media played. Social media is truly a universal tool for communication between different interest groups. However, it is also widely dependent on the abilities of the network user, specifically on access to the necessary technology. Internet is the technology available in numerous places, but individuals living in rural areas, low-income households, and secluded communities cannot be described as active internet users. Social media platforms act as a pull medium because their users have to be knowledgeable and interested enough in order to search for information on the movement and its goals (Cammaerts, 2015). Despite the fact that networked technologies may reduce the barriers to participation, new obstacles emerged to replace them, such as the need for specific digital skills and the uneven accessibility of technology. Some argue that to achieve success in their goals, grassroots movements require communication beyond like-minded citizens and online micro-audiences (Cammaerts, 2015).
At any rate, access to social media is not restricted to activists. The emancipatory potential of the technology is significant, but it could also be utilized by already existing dominant powers. This is the current reality as state and market control of the networked infrastructures remains strong, and offline power structures are being replicated online (Cammaerts, 2015). Simultaneously, the existence of surveillance programs of governments such as PRISM places certain constraints on social media usage for activist agenda. Hacktivism is viewed as cyber-terrorism in the discourse of network warfare and cyber-attacks rather than activism (Cammaerts, 2015). Consequently, the notion of private discussions online is blurring, and this has implications for confidential communication between activists.
The internet space, to be precise popular social media platforms such as Facebook, can be considered as commodified spaces. They are controlled by the companies which regularly act to suppress the goals and strategies of certain activist groups. This happens when the terms and conditions of their platforms are invoked to sanction unwanted content (Cammaerts, 2015). The most prominent example of such actions is the unannounced removal of approximately 80 political groups in April of 2011 (Cammaerts, 2015). Facebook deleted these accounts with the doubtful justification that Facebook profiles are intended to represent individual people only, and not a brand, business, group, or organization (Cammaerts, 2015). However, all of the mentioned groups aligned in their opposition to the austerity measures by the government of the United Kingdom (Cammaerts, 2015). This fact further limits the potential of social media for the active promotion of activist agendas.
Conclusion
The globality of internet technology and especially social media platforms is an efficient and cost-effective tool in the coordination of grassroots movements. Activism in the face of grassroots movements is growing together with internet technologies and the influence of individual activists. An activist is a single actor in a grassroots movement and can intentionally use media, precisely social media platforms, as a tool to create transnational networks, organize events and bring people together to address a common social grievance. Gretha Thunberg and her internet campaign Fridays for the Future is the most relevant example of such progression due to its international coverage and impact on the social perception of environmentalism.
Social media was also proven to be a multidimensional utility due to the numerous protocols that allow various means of communication. The example of such communicational practices encompasses forum discussions, emails, exchange of digital files, streaming of video and audio materials. They contribute to the sousveillance tactics of activists, help to preserve protest artifacts, and facilitate various internal organizational operations. This contributes to the argument that social media retains major role in modern-day social movements is extensive and more significant in comparison to the old media types.
Reference list
Appadurai, A. (2020). Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination, Public Culture 12(1), pp. 1-19. Web.
Boncheck, M., 1995. Grassroots in Cyberspace: Recruiting Members on the Internet, or do Computer Networks Facilitate Collective Action? A Transaction Cost Approach. Paper presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, IL.
Boulianne, S.,Ilkiw, D., Lalancette, M. (2020). School Strike 4 Climate: Social Media and the International Youth Protest on Climate Change. Media Communication. Vol 8, No2: Youth Digital Participation: Opportunities, Challenges, Contexts, and Whats at Stake. Web.
Cammaerts, B., 2015. Social Media and Activism, in Mansell, R. and Hwa, P. (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1027-1034.
Jung, J., Petkanic, Peter; Nan, D., Kim, J. (2020). When a Girl Awakened the World: A User and Social Message Analysis of Greta Thunberg Sustainability 12, no. 7: 2707. Web.
Schreiber, R., 2016. Modern print activism in the united states, Routledge.
Wukich, C., Siciliano, M., Enia, J., Boylan, B., (2017). The Formation of Transnational Knowledge Networks on Social Media. International Public Management Journal, 20:3, 381-408. Web.
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