In the modern world, the concept of participation in social movements has changed. Previously, to be recognized as a protest participant, it was necessary to participate in a parade on the street. Now all one has to do is repost the petition on Facebook or write a tweet. Accordingly, similar changes have occurred concerning the causes of movement. Nowadays, social networks themselves are becoming the birthplace of social movements. Such campaigns include, for example, Black lives Matter and #MeToo. The strength of these movements is that they can quickly unite large numbers of people from different countries. Various modern scholars propose attempts to find the reasons for the emergence of feelings of empathy for Internet movements.
Zizi Papacharissi is an American researcher in the field of the influence of new media technologies on socio-political events in the world. She is convinced that social movements that have arisen on the Internet make the public participate more intensively in the conflicts that have flared up (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 37). According to Zizi Papacharissi, the citizens have much stronger sympathy for what is happening on the Internet portals dedicated to such online campaigns. The public that united in the #MeToo campaign, which took place mainly within the framework of the Internet space, has public characteristics similar to those published in this researcher’s work.
In October 2017, a massive campaign against sexual violence and harassment began in the United States. During it, hundreds of powerful men were accused of abuse and sexual assault; many resigned from public activities; those who stood up for them were also subjected to harsh criticism. Like other social justice movements based on breaking the silence, the #MeToo campaign aims to empower women through empathy and solidarity at the expense of numerical strength. In the course of the analysis, it is necessary to find out how this movement correlates with the concept of “affective publics” proposed in the work of Zizi Papacharissi. The researcher’s position is that social movements that have emerged within the digital media framework should not be determined by their political effectiveness but rather by their emotional intensity or how they help.
Zizi Papacharissi writes that the atmosphere of social media platforms encourages a global audience to learn about the emergence of a conflict. The researcher describes such platforms as a “social awareness system” (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 36). Everyone involved and sympathetic to the #MeToo movement had the opportunity to join the discussion that erupted on Twitter. The ability to exchange real-time messaging on this social network has led to the speed of information dissemination. Users, by their actions, were able to attract public attention: thanks to retweets, posts of celebrities who accused the public figures of sexual violence quickly gained a considerable number of responses. Posting hashtags, and sharing news, and articles on the topic were also crucial for popularizing the case (Brünker et al., 2020). By early November 2017, #MeToo had been retweeted 23 million times. An interactive and international audience was finally ready to speak out against injustice in society. It can be assumed that the spectators’ compassion arose since women participants shared their personal stories of their lives.
These stories related to the experience of sexual violence and harassment; respectively, the readers of the posts could not help but begin to empathize with the heroines.
Firstly, it is tough to talk about this; therefore, the readers supported the storytellers for their courage. Secondly, according to a recent study, globally, the overall percentage of women who have experienced sexual harassment is 35.6% (Borumandnia et al., 2020); thus, many women perceive what they are told as their own stories. After learning about the reports of violence that were previously considered unacceptable to talk about, blog readers also wanted to share what happened to them. Women realized that they became victims of the same male figures, which was the beginning of collaborative storytelling. This process of co-creation of history by a group of figures in the digital space is a key characteristic of effective public.
Before this movement began, one could only hear much of victims of sexual assault on the news. However, the movement’s emergence has demonstrated that the victims can be acquaintances from work, close friends, or even relatives. Accordingly, as noted by Zizi Papacharissi, the Internet movement contributed to the fact that previously unseen groups of people gained the opportunity to speak out about recent events in their lives or about what happened a long time ago and what they were embarrassed to talk about it (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 67). Until 2017, many were convinced that the victim of sexual assault was to blame for the violence, but this paradigm of thinking is no longer considered adequate in modern realities.
Such an attitude towards what is happening is called victim-blaming. This phenomenon occurs when the victim of a crime, accident, or act of violence is held fully accountable for the violation committed against her. Male words are trusted more because there is a difference in power between men and women; men have more of it (power), which in modern realities is explained by the prevailing sexism in society (Gravelin et al., 2019). Many people believe that women made up some of the stories or exaggerated what was happening to join the project. Zizi Papacharissi herself notes that online movements tend to mix facts and opinions, making it difficult to separate truth from lies (Papacharissi, 2015, p.34). Several well-known personalities have come out with harsh criticism of the movement. In particular, Fanny Ardant stated that she does not respect the #MeToo anti-harassment movement because she believes it is based on denunciations. Indeed, such confusion between objective facts and unreliable opinions did take place. It proves that this social movement conforms to Zizi Papacharissi’s description of affective publics. However, everyone involved in the event tried to do everything possible to prevent misinformation and the spread of false rumors.
The practice of creating news stories where factual, objective information is supplemented with subjective and emotional components should not be eradicated. In general, in the era of information dissemination due to Internet technologies, readers expect to hear not only brief information about what happened but also some polemics. For example, interviews of those involved, and their personal real-life stories about the topic under discussion should be included. Emotional news content makes possible a more intensive involvement of the public in the discussion process, makes the story more soulful and gives voice to those whose positions have not been presented before (Papacharissi, 2015, p 130). Indeed, as with #MeToo, these debates must not turn into the spreading of lies for the sake of publicity. Americans generally have low levels of trust in news media due to many so-called “fake news” (Lee, 2018). Therefore, these indicators should not be allowed to fall below; conducting investigations of the reliability of online media can help in this.
In terms of the first actresses who shared their stories, many also believed that these women wanted money awards because their rapists were wealthy and successful men in Hollywood and the media industry. However, in the stories told, a general trend was outlined: it was more significant to denounce men in power than to obtain monetary compensation. However, if they demanded payment, this could not be considered a reason to accuse them of commercialism or deception, just as it is absurd to blame victims of accidents or attacks for greed. The most important thing is the final result of the company’s activities, namely, the dismissal of individuals whose participation in sexual assaults was proved, and bans on hiding sexual crimes in the workplace were introduced. In addition, there has been a change in terms of ideas about power in many people’s worldviews. What was previously regarded as personal becomes political and is widely publicized (Clair et al., 2019). Starting a discussion about the problem of sexual violence itself can speed up the process of finding solutions to this problem.
Thus, in this analysis, it was possible to demonstrate that the features of the public participating in the social movement #MeToo correspond to the characteristics of the effective public outlined in Zizi Papacharissi’s work. There is a trend that participants of Internet campaigns are more inclined to show empathy for what is happening and share news about the existing conflict. Within the framework of such social interactions, the phenomenon of collaborative storytelling arises. The participants have the opportunity to create shared content on a topic related to the social movement.
References
Brünker, F., Wischnewski, M., Mirbabaie, M., & Meinert, J. (2020). The role of social media during social movements – Observations from the #metoo debate on Twitter. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii. Web.
Borumandnia, N., & Khadembashi, N., & Tabatabaei, S. M. & Alavi Majd, H. (2020). The prevalence rate of sexual violence worldwide: a trend analysis. BMC Public Health, 20, 1835. Web.
Clair, R., Brown, N., Dougherty, D., Delemeester, H., Geist-Martin, P., Gorden, W., Sorg, T., & Turner, P. (2019). #MeToo, sexual harassment: An article, a forum, and a dream for the future. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 47, 1-19. Web.
Gravelin, C. R., Biernat, M., & Bucher, C. E. (2019). Blaming the victim of acquaintance rape: Individual, situational, and sociocultural factors. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2422. Web.
Lee, T.-T. (2018). Virtual theme collection: “Trust and credibility in news media.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 95(1), 23-27. Web.
Papacharissi Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press.