Slacktivism in the #womeningames Movement

This week we returned to talking about Slacktivism, except this time Madison and Klang define that it's a derogatory term that's often attributed to all of digital activism. They assert that digital activism isn't necessarily inferior to traditional, in-person activism because it has its benefits; those being: participation, edification, visibility, and transformation. What I found most interesting about this reading is the definition of slacktivism they used because it contradicts the one we learned at the beginning of the semester (when the term first came up). Then, it was defined as lazy activism, in which people were only "activists" for an extremely short period of time because they were only doing "activist work" only in a digital space to appear as if they were part of and helping a cause to look good and/or, at least, not against something. Thus, they're not intending or even putting in the effort to forward the movement but ONLY for their own gain.

Regardless of which definition I apply to my own movement, the women in games movement, I quickly found an example of earlier in the week of the bad-side of slacktivism. The group Putting The G Into Gaming claims to be a "campaign to proactively address and improve gender imbalance across the UK Games industry." Yet, their website has nothing going on and their last Twitter post was Oct. 17th (when I looked at it on Tuesday). The post highlights a women named Viki Freeman becoming the Chief Strategy Officer of a studio. This post and group seems to be severely lacking effort when you compare it to Women in Games and Fem Devs Meetup. The former, another self-proclaimed activist group, has posted and/or retweeted all week; their most notable being their announcement of them attending an "industry get-together," IRL (the name of it), and highlighting new partner and/or their specific accomplishments. Specifically, lawyers of L&T, Rebecca King and Elaahe Farsimadan, have become Women in Games ambassadors and progress has been made with the Women in Games chapter in Asia (who only began in May). And as for Fem Devs Meetup, they posted an announcement of the events planned for this month.