Metrics to Movements

Social Media Metrics of Social Movements

1. #BlackoutDay

2. Complex Math of Social Media Movements

3. Social Movements+Equations

4. Dear CNN, we have a problem

5. See Paradise by the Dashboard Light?

6. Let Nobody Turn Me Around

---

Synopsis: This is an ongoing series documenting hashtag activism as it plays out in the sphere of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and other social media platforms. How they subvert the very order & nature of the companies providing these spheres. Then undergo more complicating measures with the commentary of the media, both main stream & niche. While much attention has been given to documenting the Arab Spring & Ferguson movements, usually they leave out very key insights, usually reducing it to views, traffic, or trying to relate a human interest side to it. All of which is worth evaluating, while not forgetting, dismissing or erasing what is very clear to see.

There are human consequences both personal & political to these phenomena, all too easily derided as not existing or even playing an impactful force in the lives that are transformed by them. While starting with #BlackOutDay it tries to bring in other notable moments and correlate them to one another in a far-reaching philosophical & sociological way.

Following the #BlackLivesMatter to #Feruson to the #BaltimoreUprising there is a clear line of inquiry and commentary, much of it rather uninformed. What is needed for these movements, or any social media work, is to place the emphasis less on the top-line data (likes, shares, and other vanity metrics) and more on how we quantify and qualify engagement. What this sustained push-back has shown is that people are informed by and taking real world actions based on these and to suggest otherwise is simply not plausible. While not devaluing all the hard work that organizers and activists do on the ground, a great deal of the newfound attention to these decades, and in many cases, centuries old problems is getting the word out. Replacing the old phone tree of the earlier Civil Rights Movements with Twitter and Instagram leverages something from a local occurrence with limited national media attention, to global responses from a now flattened field of participants.

Explore with me the causes, the responses, and how those are measured and then turned into narratives. Those employed by traditional media, social media consultants, and thought leaders and pundits globally.