What's Your Online Battle Cry...and Does Anyone Care?
The other day I was accused of being sexist because I ‘tweeted’ out against female genital mutilation. I should have apparently been non-gender specific.
My boyfriend said
‘Isn’t that like saying “How dare you sponsor a child in Africa? What about all the children in India?”’
I didn’t think it was exactly but didn’t really want to analyze the metaphor since it was 11pm and I was knackered. Fortunately the question was rhetorical and his outrage more than compensated for the sting of the insult. I hadn’t considered that the cutting of the foreskin was something I had to be concerned about. I don’t truly believe that it is equivalent but since I don’t have one, perhaps it doesn’t figure in my everyday consciousness…however I definitely do have a clitoris and think it would be an abomination to cut it off. Nevertheless, to this abomination I only gave one tweet and a blog post on the topic.
It occurred to me in the aftermath, that we rarely have enough passion to fight more than a few battles, if we are to do them justice.
And yet as our accessibility to information grows through the increasing proliferation of technology, ignorance becomes less and less of an excuse which means the more and more we fall into denial. It’s all there at the click of our fingers (or our mice), atrocities in North Korea, political manipulation in Russia, ill treatment of animals in our own backyard.
Information is easily ignored – so much so that we now even have words to define it like online noise or virtual chatter. Making yourself heard in the noise has spawned an entire industry of online tools from blogging and SEO to twitter and search engines. As far as I’m concerned it’s all incidental – because you can have the most marvelous strategies and they’ll all fail if you don’t love what you’re talking about.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati