GenY on D&I: Coming of Age as an Advocate in the Social Media Era

During college, my Facebook newsfeed was typically the first thing I pulled up in the morning, and the place I turned throughout the day to compose lengthy posts about social justice and current events. It provided a welcome break from coursework and an outlet for challenging emotions. The likes and encouraging comments rolling in also became addictive, a source of constant, tangible validation.

Even the few dissident voices among my digital crowd provided a welcome challenge: here was a way to change minds. Spending the better part of an hour typing up the perfect response to every argument my challengers raised was worth it when I hit “post” and felt my work was done (for another several minutes at least). There were times that my entire day revolved around tending to the discussion my posts generated. At the time, it felt fulfilling, even when it often left me trembling with anxiety.

Gradually, my mindset began to shift. When stray contrarian responses slipped into my comment threads and I hurried to reply, I began to recognize that the anxiety I felt afterward wasn’t worth the effort. Soon, I found my enthusiasm for composing new posts just wasn’t there. At first this troubled me—did I not care anymore? I had once derived so much of my identity from being that online “educator” that I now felt aimless—confused about my sudden ambivalence toward participating.

Eventually, I arrived at a different conclusion about my new distaste for social media activism. The types of posts I had once found so satisfying to compose were ineffective on several levels.

We often cultivate our online communities such that they are populated chiefly by those who share our viewpoints. We end up writing to an echo chamber, particularly when corporations carefully craft algorithms that hide from our newsfeeds the content that they determine we may dislike, and the people we engage with more rarely. Even where I had encountered different perspectives, I came to realize how few minds I had probably changed. As I learned more about impactful education and facilitation, I began to see much of my previous online engagement as at odds with my goals for changing minds.

Furthermore, I wondered how my time might have been put to better use than engaging with a screen. The contraction “slacktivism” has become so familiar that it has found its way into Oxford Dictionaries, and it came to mind when I considered my frustrations with how social justice often appears on social media. But one day, I came across a post from a friend citing her reasons for stepping away from Facebook. Among her reasons was the “performative progressivism” dominating many online spaces. “Yes, that’s it!” I thought. This term captured the essence of my distaste: posts like the ones I had written in the past were not just passive, they were a performance for an audience that would applaud me again and again. The most insidious problem with this performance lies in the fact that advocacy for marginalized communities is meant to be about and for them—not me. Somewhere along the way, my ego had taken the wheel.

I won’t discount the value that social media held for me at a formative time in life, helping me to work through nuances and articulate my perspectives, which shaped me into the person I am today. And I’ll never diminish the value of writing in self-care; this has proved one of the most helpful ways for me to cope with painful realities. But these days, when I use writing to think through a problem or process my feelings about an event, I often keep it to myself, or use it to inform talking points that I can draw upon—in productive discussions with real people, unmeasured by a tally of “likes”. My energy is finite, and I am grateful to have reached a point where I am decidedly unwilling to channel it into efforts that aren’t serving my goals, my well-being, or the communities I seek to empower.