Things That Left Me Shook Week 14

       “Will the revolution be tweeted” and is Old Town Road by Lil Nas x a country song are the two biggest debates going down in the United States right now. The articles this week ranged from social media sucks and is the equivalent of Satan himself to social media is the bees knees #yolo. The different kinds of environmental organizations were also scrutinized, and let me just say legacy groups are a yikes because they focus on scientific and policy expertise, engaging elite decision maker persuasion, low-threshold participation, and sometimes will even accept money from the companies that they should be working to dismantle. Internet Mediated groups are more likely to address climate change as a social and political issue while also utilizing grassroots efforts. The main problem with that though is that they only target two subsets of the population: the alarmed and the concerned and dont really do anything to try and reach the other four groups. Thursday’s readings all focused on how young people are getting involved with the fight for climate justice from Zero Hour to the Sunrise Movement to HBCUs to the NAACP. My one complaint is that the majority of the articles that featured student activists directly only referred to activists in the north, not a single person from a Southern state was featured in those articles. Shout out to the NAACP for featuring a Texan, because that was the only article that mentioned a southern  climate activist. You cannot tell me that there aren’t notable Southern climate change activists that those publications could’ve added, but no the south is conservative so all of its youth are not #environmentallywoke (cough bullshit cough). Two of the articles tried to stay positive by presenting us with reasons to stay hopeful but the Sierreclub one made me laugh for several reasons. Half of the article was redacted, why was it redacted? Were they just like hey lets give them broad reasons to be happy but then redact any specific information cus #fuckthepublic? Honestly that was just so wild for me because I cannot fathom why they would ever feel the need to redact ny information. 

       This weeks articles made me happy because I love learning about what people are doing about climate change and I love hearing about what young folk are doing. Still salty about the lack of Southerners featured but its fine I’m fine IM FINE. I am at least glad that not all the folk featured were white so thank god for small miracles ya know? I’m also very confused as to why Sierraclub redacted half of that article, but at least it made me chuckle a little. 

Key Terms:

1) Silicon Valley Ideology~ tied to digitally networked and horizontal activism, privileges the individual, doesnt have organization.  

2) Techno-optimism~ approaches that emphasize the potential of social media tech to solve social problems

3) Techno-ambivalence~ willingness to make claims of newness but positions claims within a serious assessment of limitations 

4) Techno-Pessimism~ promises of social media are hyperbolic and superficial 

5) Political Process Theory~ 4 dimensions of political systems that shape collective action: the relative openness, the stability of a system’s elite alignments, the presence of elite allies, and states capacity and propensity for repression.