Back in the day when civil rights movements were happening, the only way people were exposed to what was happening during those times or kept up to date is if they were watching the news on tv that day or if they happened to be watching at the time the news broke out. It still reached people and people were still aware of what was happening but you could never really feel the effects like we can today. One of the biggest differences between civil rights movements today as opposed to ones in the 90s, 70s, 60s, etc. is the scale at which we were all exposed to it because it was all happening right in our back pockets and as a result, it came to be an at-home issue for most people. Thanks to social media, issues like the black lives matter movement can not only move us nationally but in our own backyards. It wasn’t just big cities protesting and mobilizing it was happening in small towns and neighborhoods. This is because people are able to utilize social media to communicate with local people and organize marches, and other advocacy groups and can lead to more people getting involved in something that was more difficult to accomplish. Any group you joined, or march people attended was the most likely word of mouth. Social media allowed for the black lives matter movement to mobilize at a rate that other black activists might not have been able to do previously. Social media has become a powerful mobilization channel because of the rate at which it can reach people and the number of people they can get to come out. This is because people can share meeting places, times, create groups, or mass post on all different platforms to reach people who care about the same causes which are why the civil rights movement was so big in 2020.
I would say the way social media is changing the way we document history by providing us with a living archive that is constantly changing. When something happens, within the last 15 to 20 years it is almost automatically documented online via social media or the news. Since the internet is permanent historians will always be able to utilize the internet to pull up posts, tweets, news articles to reference, conduct research and try to understand what was going on during a specific time for example how people reacted online during the 2020 civil rights movement, the pandemic, women's marches, etc. or how social media was able to expand a cause. They will also use social media and internet archiving to compare and contrast the way things have changed in the future. Historians have already been known to do internet archiving it is just a part of their research and work to document history correctly.
Questions:
How has social media played a role in the 2020 civil rights movement and protests? How has social media become a powerful mobilization channel? How is social media changing the way people document history?
