Playful political activism on social media
Use social media to spread political or ethical ideas. The purpose is to design a way in which activism can be channeled through social media networks in a playful way. The goal is not to make pamphlets, but to make people play in a way that conveys a political message, while occupying/appropriating (their use of) social media.
Deliverables:
A description of the type of appropriation processes on social media, including a practical example/test run. The documentation should include the steps that anybody should follow to use that kind of appropriation, and screenshots of both the (political) action and the results (that is, the way people react to it).
When starting the project, we found it necessary to run a thorough brainstorm. We used brainstorming as a method for producing a lot of different ideas without judgement. We all had ideas about what social medium we could use, what kind of political or ethical messages to convey, and how this could be illustrated visually. We touched upon topics like religion, news and politics on different social medias. As a next step we discussed strengths and limits of the different ideas, themes and tools, to quickly narrow down our initial amount of ideas. This brainstorm led to discussions about what kind of behaviours on the social media that we found annoying, fun or noteworthy. We ended up identifying the concept of slacktivism as a potential issue to work with.
‘#SaveTheArctic’ was developed in the class ‘Designing Digital Play’ and created along with my fellow students Justin Daneman, Casper Hamalainen, Mads Nedergaard and Jonas Haugesen at the IT University of Copenhagen in the fall of 2014.