Poell and Van Djick

In class today we discussed Poell and Van Djick's concepts of acceleration and personalization. As I understand them, these concepts are broad trends in activist communication that have been made possible through the affordances of social media. Both acceleration and personalization are widely present in the environmental justice movement. The environmental justice movement as a whole can be credited to the trends of acceleration and personalization. It's a concept that's exemplified by issues that would normally fly under the radar of mass media, if they had not been spread widely and efficiently by social media posts authored by those who are directly affected by an environmental injustice. I'll use the Flint water crisis as an example. Had this issue occurred in a pre-social media era, it would have been widely covered in Flint itself by local media, tangentially covered in Michigan by statewide media, and possibly (although not likely) mentioned briefly in national media. However, due to social media access, residents of Flint were able to tell their (personalized) stories to a broad range of people through (accelerated) social media means. In turn, mass media responded to the national outcry against the injustice and covered the story in depth. The environmental justice movement is built on issues such as these, concepts that may never have coalesced into an activist movement at all had the speed and humanization of social media not exposed them as a consistent trend of detrimental environmental issues against marginalized individuals and communities.