Social action essay
Social action, by definition, is “a social policy of reform.” But what does that actually mean? Let’s break it down. Society is obviously our community – all the people we know – but it can also be national or even global as well as just local. A policy is a proposed or adopted course or principle of action – it’s the ordered customs, laws and organisations by which we live. And reform is when someone makes changes in something to improve its functionality. In sum we understand social action to be (far more simply) “changes to a people’s ways of living, in order to make their community stronger.” But in order for changes to be made, there need to be people who can not only recognise the need for change, but who can also do something about it so that everyone understands the need for change. These are the people who actually introduce and publicise the social action – be it in the medium of a short film, a protest or movement, a magazine article, a Facebook event or even something as simple as a poster. And on the receiving end of all of these, societies can change – whether they are local communities or wider. If the social action is powerful enough, it can even change things worldwide. To make any change at all though, it has to make sense and give a good argument of why the change should happen – in order that people will agree with it and actively try to change their attitudes toward the topic of the action.
There are several techniques that social actions utilise to achieve this change of attitude in the public – for example if what they are trying to change is based on a sad topic such as dealing with famine in Africa, the action will pull on its audience’s heartstrings by showing footage or images of those people in worse conditions than ourselves. This results in us being sympathetic and so, without our noticing, it has already affected our attitudes. The action might then hit home by pleading with the audience through using phrases like ‘we need your help. Just £2 a month can help save a life - to you that’s the price of a sandwich, or a carton of milk.’ This makes us feel guilty – and we feel that we should help; we need to help. Blood in the mobile is a social action video made to raise awareness about how people mining the minerals that a mobile phone consists of are being forced to work under terrible conditions. It also makes us feel extremely guilty, because it shows raw, scary footage of how unethical the treatment of the miners is. The slogan is also powerful; ‘is there blood in your pocket?’ is extremely effective at making us feel guilt. The idea is, if we feel bad or guilty about what we see, we will agree with the action’s proposals to improve the situation.
Before an action can change any attitudes, it needs to make itself, and the issue being targeted, known. So how does it raise awareness? Well, just by existing. There will be people out there who don’t know about the action or even the problem that it targets – so, by merely being there to be seen or heard, the action raises awareness. That’s one way to look at how a social action can raise awareness – the other obvious way is how it actually raises awareness using the information within it. A video might include some facts or statistics that really put something into perspective – thinking back to our famine analogy a video might say something like ‘every 12 seconds, another child dies from famine.’ While this is another example of a sympathy-inducing technique, it is also given as a fact and so people who did not know the fact before will receive a raised awareness when they hear it. Other things like statistics and quotes can also raise awareness about a topic.
Social action doesn’t always have to be externally initiated. In other words: there are people in minority groups, non-traditional groups it could be said, who do not have such a strong voice as perhaps the majority – the more traditional groups in a society – who still need to be heard and helped. So if no one from outside that minority of people is seeing the issues and how they need to be combated, the people within the minority need to do it themselves. Putting it simply, externally initiated social actions are created by people who can see issues within a different society and go about helping them by creating a video or event, whereas internally initiated social actions are people in a minority who are crying out for help or change themselves, and trying to make their problems known through a video or event. There are issues that go hand-in-hand with this though; the very problems that the people might wish to change could be what holds them back within their social action. We may take for granted access to the internet, cameras, technical equipment and YouTube; and thus the easiness of making a video or production as a social action, but there are others in these minority groups who do not have such luxuries, which is why their voice is not as loud as some others.
One of the mains things a social action does is challenge dominant representations and agendas. Just look at disputes in America about gun ownership – Bowling for Columbine was a social action video created to challenge the idea that it is an American’s right to bear arms. The way it goes about doing this is by showing guns in a poor light; it shows how easily accessible they are in America and how, by using people with extraordinarily different lifestyles to our own, many Americans are not fit to bear arms. In other words, Michael Moore (presenter of Bowling for Columbine) speaks to people who display certain attributes of stupidity. By doing this he wins us over: we cannot help but automatically come to the conclusion (supposedly on our own, although he cunningly only speaks to such people who it is obvious are unfit to bear arms) that it is a poor decision for civilian gun ownership in America to be legal. It may be so that many people in America are perfectly qualified and, putting it bluntly, sane enough, to bear arms; however because he does not show many people of such a nature in the video, the video makes it clear that most are not. Thus he effectively challenges the dominant representations: he shows the (almost unanimous) nationwide opinion, due to which even he has owned guns all his life, and stamps on it with the proverbial boot by displaying how ridiculously stupid its believers are.
A lot of social action videos (although I say video here, it is a loosely held term because, despite the fact that the large majority of well known social actions are publicised through a video, many are not) are focused on bringing about the strengthening of a particular community. But there are of course those whose clear interest is in bringing more communities together, to strengthen those community ties. So how do they do this? Simple: they find mutual interests of change – with mutual pros and mutual cons and they play on these, to try and balance the communities into similar lifestyles.
Social actions need to convince people of something: that’s their purpose. And what better way to convince someone than to produce masses of information that is in favour of the argument? There are different ways a social action can provide information: it can be in the form of interviews, quotes, statistics, facts, images, footage – the list goes on.
Now let’s think about campaigns. The difference between a social action and a campaign is that an action might be a video, poster or movement that raises awareness about something or other, and provides people who don’t know about that thing with the information they need to make a difference. They take on many different forms depending on the nature of the action, and sometimes they even go by different names – you might have heard them referred to as awareness campaigns, audience engagement, advocacy campaigns, or outreach campaigns. Essentially, it’s an effort to engage people on a particular issue to accomplish one or all of the following: build public awareness, ignite personal involvement, inspire social change and work in an organized and active way toward a particular goal. When a social action becomes slightly more well-known, a campaign can be started to really combat some of the issues the action has raised. With more people involved, social actions become social action campaigns and the likelihood of change is increased. Take Jamie’s School Dinners for an example. Before that small series of documentaries, few people had spoken out about the issues with the healthiness of school dinners. After it, everyone became spurred on the by the communal wave of society’s new-found outrage and things began to happen. When more people got involved, a campaign was started. More and more schools became involved and eventually, an actual law was created so as to ensure that all schools would provide healthy dinners. Thus, a successful social action and a successful campaign are completed.
Political parties often make social action videos around the time of an election. While many would see these as adverts for their party, they are in fact social actions because the people making them believe that change needs to be made and that they are the ones capable of doing so. Just look at the Labour party’s video A Nightmare on Your Street; it depicts the Conservative party to be entirely evil with their decisions in government by giving them the faces of unperturbed businessmen knocking on doors and ruining family’s lives. They argue that Conservative are the wrong people to be leaders of the Government and that Labour are the correct choice; and they outline exactly why they should be voted for. This method of showing Conservatives in a poor light and promoting their own qualities is intended to change voting behaviour in the public to be in favour of themselves, and is a perfect example of how social actions can change voting behaviour.
There are now ways of making a social action known that did not exist before the invention of the internet. Mainstream media websites like Facebook, Twitter, My Space, YouTube and other similar social networks are perfect for the promotion of social actions. On Twitter, many people have thousands or even millions of followers. Imagine if one of those people ‘Tweeted’ a link to a YouTube video of a social action – millions would be able to see it in seconds. Then those people can re-tweet and further promote the video themselves if they wish, and encourage their own followers to do the same and so on; and so within minutes of that first tweet, potentially millions and millions of people worldwide could have watched that video. Also, if a social action as powerful or controversial enough, it could even make it on to the news, where it would very quickly become known nationwide. So it is clear that mainstream media websites are an extremely effective way of promoting social actions.
One of the main ways a social action video can build a relationship with its viewers is by being biased. By being very opinionated, viewers can feel their own opinions enhancing or changing, due to the persuasiveness of the one-sided argument they’re being presented with. Another technique videos use to create a bond with its audience is by making themselves seem victimised. People hate bullies. And who do they love and want to help? The people being bullied. If a social action video is all attack and has no plea for help, people will see no reason to support it because from what they’ve seen it’s clearly capable of that itself. Sometimes being the ‘little guy’ isn’t so bad – people will want to support you.
There’s plenty of evidence of change as a result of social action projects: just look at Jamie’s School Dinners – he persuaded the court to create laws about food requirements and regulations in schools – actual laws! There are other examples too; ever heard of Kony 2012? Of course you have. That’s because of change like this:
- The Kony 2012 YouTube video continues to get over 100,000 views every week.
- 3,729,825 people from 185 countries pledged their support for Kony 2012.
- The video reached 100 million views in 6 days, making it the fastest growing viral video in human history.
- #STOPKONY was tweeted 1,200 times per minute at its peak.
So you see, looking at how social actions can have such a massive impact and cause such huge change, it's clear that everything I’ve spoken about in this essay is essential for the creation of an effective and successful social action.
There are several techniques that social actions utilise to achieve this change of attitude in the public – for example if what they are trying to change is based on a sad topic such as dealing with famine in Africa, the action will pull on its audience’s heartstrings by showing footage or images of those people in worse conditions than ourselves. This results in us being sympathetic and so, without our noticing, it has already affected our attitudes. The action might then hit home by pleading with the audience through using phrases like ‘we need your help. Just £2 a month can help save a life - to you that’s the price of a sandwich, or a carton of milk.’ This makes us feel guilty – and we feel that we should help; we need to help. Blood in the mobile is a social action video made to raise awareness about how people mining the minerals that a mobile phone consists of are being forced to work under terrible conditions. It also makes us feel extremely guilty, because it shows raw, scary footage of how unethical the treatment of the miners is. The slogan is also powerful; ‘is there blood in your pocket?’ is extremely effective at making us feel guilt. The idea is, if we feel bad or guilty about what we see, we will agree with the action’s proposals to improve the situation.
Before an action can change any attitudes, it needs to make itself, and the issue being targeted, known. So how does it raise awareness? Well, just by existing. There will be people out there who don’t know about the action or even the problem that it targets – so, by merely being there to be seen or heard, the action raises awareness. That’s one way to look at how a social action can raise awareness – the other obvious way is how it actually raises awareness using the information within it. A video might include some facts or statistics that really put something into perspective – thinking back to our famine analogy a video might say something like ‘every 12 seconds, another child dies from famine.’ While this is another example of a sympathy-inducing technique, it is also given as a fact and so people who did not know the fact before will receive a raised awareness when they hear it. Other things like statistics and quotes can also raise awareness about a topic.
Social action doesn’t always have to be externally initiated. In other words: there are people in minority groups, non-traditional groups it could be said, who do not have such a strong voice as perhaps the majority – the more traditional groups in a society – who still need to be heard and helped. So if no one from outside that minority of people is seeing the issues and how they need to be combated, the people within the minority need to do it themselves. Putting it simply, externally initiated social actions are created by people who can see issues within a different society and go about helping them by creating a video or event, whereas internally initiated social actions are people in a minority who are crying out for help or change themselves, and trying to make their problems known through a video or event. There are issues that go hand-in-hand with this though; the very problems that the people might wish to change could be what holds them back within their social action. We may take for granted access to the internet, cameras, technical equipment and YouTube; and thus the easiness of making a video or production as a social action, but there are others in these minority groups who do not have such luxuries, which is why their voice is not as loud as some others.
One of the mains things a social action does is challenge dominant representations and agendas. Just look at disputes in America about gun ownership – Bowling for Columbine was a social action video created to challenge the idea that it is an American’s right to bear arms. The way it goes about doing this is by showing guns in a poor light; it shows how easily accessible they are in America and how, by using people with extraordinarily different lifestyles to our own, many Americans are not fit to bear arms. In other words, Michael Moore (presenter of Bowling for Columbine) speaks to people who display certain attributes of stupidity. By doing this he wins us over: we cannot help but automatically come to the conclusion (supposedly on our own, although he cunningly only speaks to such people who it is obvious are unfit to bear arms) that it is a poor decision for civilian gun ownership in America to be legal. It may be so that many people in America are perfectly qualified and, putting it bluntly, sane enough, to bear arms; however because he does not show many people of such a nature in the video, the video makes it clear that most are not. Thus he effectively challenges the dominant representations: he shows the (almost unanimous) nationwide opinion, due to which even he has owned guns all his life, and stamps on it with the proverbial boot by displaying how ridiculously stupid its believers are.
A lot of social action videos (although I say video here, it is a loosely held term because, despite the fact that the large majority of well known social actions are publicised through a video, many are not) are focused on bringing about the strengthening of a particular community. But there are of course those whose clear interest is in bringing more communities together, to strengthen those community ties. So how do they do this? Simple: they find mutual interests of change – with mutual pros and mutual cons and they play on these, to try and balance the communities into similar lifestyles.
Social actions need to convince people of something: that’s their purpose. And what better way to convince someone than to produce masses of information that is in favour of the argument? There are different ways a social action can provide information: it can be in the form of interviews, quotes, statistics, facts, images, footage – the list goes on.
Now let’s think about campaigns. The difference between a social action and a campaign is that an action might be a video, poster or movement that raises awareness about something or other, and provides people who don’t know about that thing with the information they need to make a difference. They take on many different forms depending on the nature of the action, and sometimes they even go by different names – you might have heard them referred to as awareness campaigns, audience engagement, advocacy campaigns, or outreach campaigns. Essentially, it’s an effort to engage people on a particular issue to accomplish one or all of the following: build public awareness, ignite personal involvement, inspire social change and work in an organized and active way toward a particular goal. When a social action becomes slightly more well-known, a campaign can be started to really combat some of the issues the action has raised. With more people involved, social actions become social action campaigns and the likelihood of change is increased. Take Jamie’s School Dinners for an example. Before that small series of documentaries, few people had spoken out about the issues with the healthiness of school dinners. After it, everyone became spurred on the by the communal wave of society’s new-found outrage and things began to happen. When more people got involved, a campaign was started. More and more schools became involved and eventually, an actual law was created so as to ensure that all schools would provide healthy dinners. Thus, a successful social action and a successful campaign are completed.
Political parties often make social action videos around the time of an election. While many would see these as adverts for their party, they are in fact social actions because the people making them believe that change needs to be made and that they are the ones capable of doing so. Just look at the Labour party’s video A Nightmare on Your Street; it depicts the Conservative party to be entirely evil with their decisions in government by giving them the faces of unperturbed businessmen knocking on doors and ruining family’s lives. They argue that Conservative are the wrong people to be leaders of the Government and that Labour are the correct choice; and they outline exactly why they should be voted for. This method of showing Conservatives in a poor light and promoting their own qualities is intended to change voting behaviour in the public to be in favour of themselves, and is a perfect example of how social actions can change voting behaviour.
There are now ways of making a social action known that did not exist before the invention of the internet. Mainstream media websites like Facebook, Twitter, My Space, YouTube and other similar social networks are perfect for the promotion of social actions. On Twitter, many people have thousands or even millions of followers. Imagine if one of those people ‘Tweeted’ a link to a YouTube video of a social action – millions would be able to see it in seconds. Then those people can re-tweet and further promote the video themselves if they wish, and encourage their own followers to do the same and so on; and so within minutes of that first tweet, potentially millions and millions of people worldwide could have watched that video. Also, if a social action as powerful or controversial enough, it could even make it on to the news, where it would very quickly become known nationwide. So it is clear that mainstream media websites are an extremely effective way of promoting social actions.
One of the main ways a social action video can build a relationship with its viewers is by being biased. By being very opinionated, viewers can feel their own opinions enhancing or changing, due to the persuasiveness of the one-sided argument they’re being presented with. Another technique videos use to create a bond with its audience is by making themselves seem victimised. People hate bullies. And who do they love and want to help? The people being bullied. If a social action video is all attack and has no plea for help, people will see no reason to support it because from what they’ve seen it’s clearly capable of that itself. Sometimes being the ‘little guy’ isn’t so bad – people will want to support you.
There’s plenty of evidence of change as a result of social action projects: just look at Jamie’s School Dinners – he persuaded the court to create laws about food requirements and regulations in schools – actual laws! There are other examples too; ever heard of Kony 2012? Of course you have. That’s because of change like this:
- The Kony 2012 YouTube video continues to get over 100,000 views every week.
- 3,729,825 people from 185 countries pledged their support for Kony 2012.
- The video reached 100 million views in 6 days, making it the fastest growing viral video in human history.
- #STOPKONY was tweeted 1,200 times per minute at its peak.
So you see, looking at how social actions can have such a massive impact and cause such huge change, it's clear that everything I’ve spoken about in this essay is essential for the creation of an effective and successful social action.