In praise of slacktivism

My friend (successfully) defended his dissertation last week. At one point in the three hour defense, one of his committee members used the word "slacktivism" without irony. The concept seems to have leaped out of its digital confines in blogs and tweets and into a serious academic setting.

This is due in no small part to the summer of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised $115 million, according to the organization. As fast as social media filled with videos of people dumping icy water onto themselves, it also filled with critiques and commentary on the trendy form of donation.

It has become quite popular to point to such efforts as a symptom of the general shallowness of our online lives. Virtual actions such as signing petitions, sharing links, or using specific hashtags are categorized as "slacktivist," a somewhat paradoxical combination of "activist" and "slacker" which relies on a sharp distinction between virtual and non-virtual social action.

My problem with using the label "slacktivism" in order to critique virtual social action is twofold: 1) It assumes a robust non-virtual social action with relatively well-defined forms and goals, and 2) it assumes an understanding of virtual acts as less real than non-virtual actions.

Our assumptions about non-virtual social action: When people accuse others of "slacktivism," they appear to have in mind a non-virtual counterpart that contributes more robustly or more directly to the issue at hand. I take public demonstration (protests, strikes, large and public fundraising events, etc.) to be the ultimate non-virtual social action. It is the standard against which we measure virtual actions like sharing a link, for instance. Simply sharing a link, the critique goes, is just not as good as, say, attending a protest, presumably because it does not require as much (time? energy? effort?) from the link-sharer. Thus while the action may be activism, its lack of personal risk and "real" effort necessitates the addition of "slacker," making it "slacktivism."

In college, I spent a significant amount of time working to end the death penalty in Maryland. One rainy fall afternoon, a group of about forty abolitionists from different organizations gathered outside of Maryland's death row. More specifically, we were on a rather desolate city street under an overpass. We held signs, we chanted, we sang. Some of us prayed. After about an hour, I had a troubling thought: What is the purpose of what we're doing? 

I had no problem understanding what it meant to write to legislators, to accompany death row inmates themselves through letters, or to raise awareness on campus. On that rainy and in nearly every other public demonstration I've attended, I couldn't shake the feeling of anticipation. In my more honest moments, I could ask another question: What am I/are we waiting for?

As far as I can tell, the anticipation is for one of two things, either a significant amount of people to witness the demonstration in person or, more commonly, for a significant amount of media attention. The problem is that American culture does not seem to have spaces for the kind of direct social action that we imagine when we judge virtual action. I am not convinced that my standing on a street with a sign is better for a cause than sharing a link to a well-argued piece to hundreds of people online. I am also not convinced that the many people who will re-share that link are doing so in lieu of the non-virtual social action we idealize.

Frightening as it may sound, it's possible that the robust social space we believe is essential to democratic life may not actually exist, or if it does, it may not exist where we think it does.

Our assumptions about virtual action: There pervades in moral critiques of the internet a double-talk that assumes virtual activity forms us in real (and usually negative) ways, while at the same time maintains that our behaviors online aren't as "real" as those offline (to the extent we're really ever 'off'). We can't have it both ways, and it seems pretty clear that virtual actions are both real and formative.

If this is the case, shouldn't we be less dismissive of altruistic, outward-looking actions online, no matter how small? Dismissing so-called "slacktivism" relies on a view of social action that is mostly about results. For many systems of ethics, however, there is much more to consider than consequences. Virtue ethics, for instance, maintains that the often small, repetitive actions in a person's life cultivate habits that are either virtuous or vicious. If this is true, then even the smallest actions online (which we should take to be real actions), contribute in some way to the formation of one's habits.


By leveling the criticism of "slacktivism" at virtual social action, we delude ourselves into idealizing an alternative that, more often that not, does not exist. We also undermine the reality of virtual space, the practical effect of which is that we won't be capable of reflecting upon it and its effects. Onward, slacktivists!