Dynamics of Acceleration and Personalization in #ActuallyAutistic

For this week, we read "Social Media and Activist Communication," an article by Poell and van Dijck. In this piece, the authors discussed two phenomena that occur in response to activism on social media: acceleration and personalization. At first, it was hard for me to understand these concepts, however, after Thursday's class, I feel I have a much firmer grasp on the subject. Then again, I could be totally wrong. I believe that these two dynamics describe consequences of the shift of activism onto social media.

Acceleration refers to the phenomenon in which information travels faster as a result of social media. It isn't like how it was in the twentieth century in which information in the media was in a lunch tray kind of way, as in not widespread and everything separated into their own little boxes, but it is now like a big bowl of soup, meaning that news, information, and trends travel quickly between social media platforms and are therefore heard about much faster and by a much larger audience.

Personalization is the process in which individuals shape the content they view and personalize it to fit their narrative. This doesn't necessarily have to be a twisted version of a message as it can be seen in the disabled community's response to the ban plastic straws movement, which we saw in class. Another example of this is the phrase "my body, my choice," which was originally coined in pro-choice rhetoric. It has since then been personalized by anti-maskers to fit their argument.

If one were to look into #ActuallyAutistic, they would encounter these two dynamics. I suppose acceleration could be seen in the way that trends under the hashtag operate quickly, as well as the rise and fall in popularity of specific speaking points within the hashtag. Personalization can be observed in the TikToks that take trends and put a spin on them, such as "put a finger down: autism edition" and "rating responses to telling people I'm autistic." It can also be seen in the autistic community's response to Autism Speaks' commercial, "I am autism," which actually gave way to the creation of the hashtag.