Sustainability- Acceleration or Personification?

In their article "Social Media and Activist Communication," Poell and van Dijck describe two dynamics that describe how social movements can change over time- acceleration and personification. Social media has given social movements access to much bigger audiences than ever before. With all of these new methods of content, ideas can spread and morph very rapidly as compared to the "olden" days of newspapers and radio shows. With heightened individual access to activism, the tide of social movements can shift depending on public perception. For example, a movement might become accelerated by the mass sharing of certain ideas relating to the public. Perhaps a new study might come out about a certain topic that the movement might start to use to support their ideas- they will mass spread this on social media in order to raise awareness. A movement might become personified by shifting to telling individual stories relating to certain experiences. The best example that I can think of this is the #actuallyautistic hashtag. The movement started trying to fight stereotypes about autism from a more factual perspective, but the creation of the hashtag lead to people sharing their own experiences so that they could show those not in the community what it is like to be in it.

My work this week focused on finding examples of acceleration in my chosen movement. There seems to have been a movement within the last few years to disseminate information relating to what the individual could do about their own sustainability. In the past, this call to action has focused on what the individual should do to encourage other organizations to increase their sustainability efforts.