We pay a price for the time we spend on social media, though not with money. Minutes of scrolling that turn into hours engender capitalist profit-generation and manipulation, leaving our attention spans frazzled – in return, we seem to receive little more than bursts of amusement, curiosity or disgust. My experience of running the Instagram of an environmental campaigning group, however, led me to consider whether social media can afford more than momentary stimulation for the price we pay. I’ll begin this post by accounting my initial scepticism towards social media as a platform for activism and some of the anthropological work that validates it. I’ll then explore my subsequent change of heart. More than short-lived amusement, Instagram provided new ways for my group to inform and connect. I was pushed to consider Instagram as an unlikely, but promising, way to sustain activism that often questioned the very economic system responsible for the platform’s design.
In 2021, I volunteered with Friends of the Earth Exeter (FoEE hereafter) – an environmental activist group associated with the climate justice movement, often critical of the role of capitalism in the current climate crisis. I envisioned partaking in meetings humming with dissent and passionate protests, but to my dismay ended up spending equal measures of time running the group’s Instagram. I felt a gulf between the latter – producing sleek, eye-catching posts and stories, from photographs of wildlife to technicolour infographics – and the former, which I considered the ‘real’ activism. Any time spent producing such posts surely aligned me with the logic of neoliberalism’s attention economy, striving to catch users’ attention for a brief moment, before they scrolled on to the next flicker of stimulation? Worse still, it made the infinitely small global minority of Mark Zuckerbergs out there richer, turning the cogs of the very economic system the group so readily criticised for its ecological destruction.
Though it isn’t an objective one, users pay a price for their social media use and this paints a gloomy picture for digital activism. When using social media, our data is leaked and sold, generating an immense profit for a global minority. Using social media as a platform to criticise neoliberalism – which FoEE certainly did – might be considered hypocritical in this light. The data traffic it generates fuels Instagram’s profit mechanism. Social media not only undercuts anti-capitalist activism but activism more generally, through exposing its users to manipulation. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a notable example of this, users’ data being used to manipulate their voting behaviour, their feeds being individually tailored to present them with “a picture of the world which [was] so emotionally compelling that it [was] beyond debate.” This phenomenon is not limited to such scandals. Algorithms, after all, govern the content made available to us daily to secure our enduring attention, suspending us in an echo-chamber-like environment simply because it is profitable. An environment where our most intimate views can be exploited, or our existing ones fed back to us merely to keep us hooked, seems a barren one for activism. It threatens to undermine the potential of activist groups to attract new members, or even to keep current ones.
Social media further undermines the potential for users to engage in digital activism through fragmenting our attention. Paradoxically, this links to one of the few things Paasonen concedes that social media affords us. Despite being labelled the attention economy, information passes through us so quickly on social media that the concept of attention disintegrates – we live at a time where “we can share a family photo, a recipe, an amber alert… in the space of sixty seconds, and without any emotional variance.” An excerpt from Petit’s class on ‘emotions and the Internet’ is another fitting illustration of this: a student describes how their digital time consists of moments of “bored, not bored, bored, not bored, bored.” Did FoEE’s Instagram activism stand a chance if the attention users pay to posts is so short-lived? Ironically, the potential for affective intensity – flutters of interest, amusement, disgust – that drives us fleetingly from one post to the next, is suggested by Paasonen as one of the few things users gain from social media. Overall, this paints a bleak picture for FoEE’s efforts to engage in activism on Instagram. As my time volunteering with the group went on, however, I questioned whether it was really that simple.
As my time progressed at FoEE, I found it harder to separate my time spent running the Instagram account with the ‘real’ activism that I imagined to exist only outside of the digital world. The team did carefully select alluring photographs to post, but not merely to inspire moments of compassion or curiosity. Rather, they housed links to petitions, informing users of sustained ways to act. Similarly, eye-catching graphics that the group meticulously matched to the colours of the group logo afforded more than a momentary peak in their viewers’ interest. Such posts carved out new pathways for sustained sociality. They broadcast details of upcoming meetings – much better attended thanks to their presence. The posts following these often celebrated the assembly’s success, their comments section a chance for attendees to further amplify morale (“well done everyone!” “so grateful for such important work!”) The glossy aesthetic of FoEE’s Instagram page, on the surface, appeared aligned with the logic of capitalism’s attention economy. But these aesthetics encouraged and maintained engagement that was more sustained: invites to act, to meet likeminded people and to celebrate steps in the team’s desired direction – albeit small ones. In doing so, Instagram fuelled an activist group which often criticised capitalism’s misdoings, rather than simply restricting them to perpetuating its continuance.
Campbell’s ethnographic account of Thailand’s Mae Sot industrial zone parallels mine – though it is situated outside of the realms of digital capitalism, it similarly suggests that capitalism can be challenged through exploiting its contradictions. Factories in the region increasingly employed migrant workers. Though North Atlantic narratives deem this kind of labour flexibilization to cause class fragmentation, in this context it appeared to have socially constitutive effects. As workers were placed in factory dormitories, close bonds formed – some even marrying. Co-workers helped each other to break factory rules discreetly and engaged in protests in a mix of everyday and open, collective defiance. The practices by which companies sought to create low-wage, flexible workforces – paradoxically – enabled new forms of sociality for workers. The resulting social cohesion allowed workers to question the very economic system that had dictated these conditions in the first place. In a similar way, Instagram – a platform defined by the pursuit of profit – provided an environment with novel possibilities for FoEE to further their activism, which frequently consisted of questioning the capitalist system that shaped the platform’s design.
This phenomenon seems echoed in the theories of numerous scholars – perhaps the best-known being Marx. His notion of class recomposition suggests that capitalist restructuring results in occupational and demographic changes in the working class, but simultaneously creates new conditions of possibility for cohesion through collective struggle. This similarly highlights how new forms of sociality can develop not in spite of, but because of, changes made in the capitalist pursuit of profit. Mason brings this theory up-to-date, from a time of industrial capitalism to our free-market capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism has unleashed exponential advancement in information technologies but it has simultaneously created a “route out” of itself. Why? Because in doing so, millions of networked people have been created, “financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away.” Platforms like Instagram might harvest our data for profit, but exploitation is not the whole story. In return for the price we pay to use such platforms, we are not just afforded fleeting amusement, but the possibility to educate ourselves and to connect at a scale that was not possible before. Seen in this light, my experience of FoEE’s Instagram presence seems no more at odds with ‘real’ activism than the protests and meetings I originally put on a pedestal.
Social media appears an unlikely environment for activism to thrive – indeed, we all pay a price for our use of these platforms. However, my experience at FoEE suggested to me that this isn’t the whole picture. Beneath the surface of the aesthetic photographs and technicolour infographics of FoEE’s Instagram page lay new ways for activists to inform and connect. From the bleak conditions of the attention economy sprung new possibilities for a movement which called out capitalism’s misdoings. What this means for the future is unclear. The ethnographic instance explored here might be a drop in the ocean, or it might be something more – an indication of “swathes of economic life… beginning to move to a different rhythm.”
Developed from coursework in Anthropology and Contemporary Capitalism unit at the University of Bristol Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
Author
Hannah Wright is a second-year student of the BA Anthropology course and am interested in economic, political and legal anthropology – particularly in relation to the topic of climate change.