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Description
After the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, Women’s Rights has become a significant and growing public argument across the United States. With the addition of the now viral #MeToo movement, the discussion of Women’s Rights is taking place in the real world as well as online. However, the way in which people participate in the digital portion of this cultural movement is part of an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of digital activism. Where grand physical displays of solidarity, like the Women’s March, have been historically perceived as successful in shifting towards social change, issues of inherent bias, sustainability, and other limitations constrain its effectiveness. As digital spaces and social media are now a part of our everyday lives, the affordances of utilizing these avenues for activism can possibly mitigate these constraints. Specifically, the method of hashtag activism in online spaces has been embraced by the Women’s Rights movement as evident by the virality of #MeToo. Therefore, the aim of this project was to analyze the actions of engaging with hashtag activism using a hashtag with a more limited scope—#WomenBoycottTwitter—in order to evaluate the rhetorical consequences of these digital performances of activism. Because this hashtag was intended to be only a 24- hour boycott of one platform, the data was more manageable for the size of this project while still allowing for varied intensity and frequency of tweets. Therefore, I was able to identify what tweets using #WomenBoycottTwitter were enacting before, during, and after the 24-hour digital boycott and analyze the patterns observed over the three-day timespan for any shifts in the attitudes, beliefs, and values regarding Women’s Rights. The evaluation of these shifts found that effectiveness of the rhetorical consequences is reliant on the intention of the tweet: though enactments that question, criticize, and mock did result in a few positive, yet unintentional consequences, enactments that justify and reflect resulted in more productive and intentional consequences. While more research needs to be done concerning hashtag activism, the results of this study support that engaging in hashtag activism for Women’s Rights can have productive rhetorical consequences.
