Why be the change you want to see when you can just share it instead?
The hilarious satirical video above, "Meet the Young Activist Doing Everything She Can To Change The World," pokes fun at "slacktivism," the practice of posting political and social justice content on Facebook and Twitter in lieu of taking physical action to fight for a cause.
"My generation needs to wake up, and start trying to make a meaningful difference in the world... that's why I always share political articles on Facebook whenever I see them," the video quips.
The spot was created by Millennials of New York, a Facebook page that parodies the popular photography blog Humans of New York using tropes of upper-middle-class young adult culture including but not limited to: working in finance, being smug about reading real books over digital ones and talking about astrology.
The pitch-perfect "young activist" video starts off with instrumental music and moody filter typical of feel-good social impact content, so it's only when the "activist" being profiles really gets into her spiel that you'll do a double take.
"When I see an image of a starving child, you know that's going on your newsfeed," she says.
While the video uses humor to make a good point -- that just sharing content usually doesn't have impact -- slacktivism isn't wholly ineffective. A 2015 study found that online participation extends the lifespan of protests, and helps them become social movements, like in the Occupy movement of 2011.
And one of the most famous "slacktivist" moments of recent years, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014, actually helped researchers find a faulty protein in ALS patients’ neurons that could be the key to a cure, as Quartz reported.
So, go ahead and filter your Facebook profile picture, if you want. But try and take some kind of concrete action beyond that, too. You know, in between reading Vonnegut and composting.
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