Student Blog

Is it funny or can it raise Money?

In the late 2000’s a meme began to spread across Facebook in October in which women were posting their names along with a color. The posts would read something like Miranda, Blue. Women everywhere began posting to their status like this. Men were confused as to what was happening on women’s Facebook pages. The secret status updates turned out to be women posting what color their bra was. The reason behind the posts about bra color was to raise awareness for breast cancer. The trend began to expand adding in other things such as where women left their purses at and the trend continued to expanded year after year. The trend added other things such as for women to put a number than the word inches followed by how long it took them to do their hair. The expanded trend grew so popular there was a fan page dedicated to the trend on Facebook. The fan page had the funny quote “Whether you are a full-fledged Breast Cancer supporter or a shameless, sexually charged horndog, this page is for you”. The trend was not all fun and games, however, there were groups of people who thought that the sexualization of breast cancer was problematic and did not help the cause. There were other complaints as well from men who thought it was wrong that they were left out of the trend as in 2012, 400 men died from breast cancer.

 This meme is something known as cyber activism. Cyber activism is the act of sharing a cause or charity that you identify with because you believe that by sharing or linking a post you are helping a cause. There are those that believe that cyber activism does not help however I think that cyber activism can be amazingly helpful. Not everyone has time to volunteer their time to help or the money to donate as many people are already living on thin budgets and work multiple jobs. The impact of social media on the world is important as people that share posts and participate in memes are helping even if it only inspires one person to donate, does that not help?

The idea that cyber activism isn’t helpful is I believe a poor way to look at it. The internet has helped many people due to virality alone. The website Gofundme.com allows individuals to create donation websites for themselves to share. If you go and look through the website, you can see many examples of people raising money for causes they believe through social media. When I was in my undergrad I worked with a company to help handout drink covers that doubled as hair ties or bracelets. In attempting to raise money for this project I used GoFundMe to help raise a large percentage of the funds just by sharing through social media.

One last example of online activism being helpful and not just a virality display is Team Water. This was a goal made by the YouTube channel MrBeast to raise awareness for those who did not have access to clean drinking water. The campaign using social media was able to raise 40 million dollars to build and maintain wells so that more people could have access to clean drinking water.

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