Thursday, September 5, 2013
Girls tweeting their way to power and social change
In this essay for the New York Times “Opinionator Blog,” Courtney E. Martin, talks about ways young women are using social media tools to increase awareness of sexism, speaking out and working energetically to make a difference in the world. In so doing, they are empowering themselves and others and, at the same time, fostering social justice organizing and activism on the ground. Teenage and college young women, using online petitions and campaigns “have become modern day Davids taking on the Goliaths of our time — multinational corporations like Facebook and Lego, and media giants, like Seventeen magazine and Clear Channel, “ says Martin. She writes: “Indeed, most everyone I spoke to talked about online petitions, and the social media that so often fuels them, as being about so much more than the official goal stated on the petition; it’s about what many online organizers refer to as the “ladder of engagement” — someone signs a petition, before long they’re creating their own, then running a full-fledged campaign.” Courtney Martin, author of several books and one of the former editors of Feministing, is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network. Here’s a one-and-a-half-minute video about what “Solutions Journalism” is and how it differs from other kinds of journalism.
