EGOCENTRIC SLACKTIVISTS? Users reflecting on their participation in social media campaigns

Audience research often employs quantitative research methods, which conceptualize audiences by talking about them and their social media behaviour, rather than with them. In this way, audiences become oversimplified and objectified, stripping them off their social positions and individual contexts. With the emergence of the digital age and social media, this led to participation in social media campaigns and the motivation behind it to be oversimplified to two extreme perspectives conceptualizing audiences as egocentric slacktivists or empowered citizens with possibilities to revolutionize the world. Inspirational to this thesis, Hall’s (1973) Encoding/Decoding model and Morley’s research on audiences provide insights that social position such as class and education shape the discursive resources that audiences use to “decode” or understand media messages in different ways. This indicates the subjectivity of audience media readings and motivations, and signifies the importance of inclusion of the participants themselves in the research process through qualitative methods. Stronger inclusion of audiences can also lead to their de-objectification by providing them with their own voice, rather than speaking for them. This qualitative study puts audiences in ‘the driver seat’, and allows them to reflect on their own social media behaviour, and participation in social media campaigns more specifically. The thesis reveals that the existing binary conceptualization of social media campaigns is too simplistic, and highlights the complexity of people’s reflections on motivations and thought-processes behind participation. Thus, the research question of this thesis is: how do university students reflect on their use of social media as a way to contribute to social media campaigns? The decision to focus on university students is based on the suggested relationship between higher education, political knowledge and civic engagement, as well as the typical age group that university students fall into, which constitutes the most active group of social media users. Based on the two insights, this group of young people provides a good opportunity to obtain rich, in-depth reflections on the perceived political and social impacts of social media campaigns, as well as the subjective insights into motivations to participate. In total, thirteen semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with students of Erasmus University Rotterdam in March and April of 2018. Results of thematic analysis suggest a complex interrelationship between motivations for participation in social media campaigns, with some support for ideas of slacktivism, including low physical effort and personal interests, as well as public concerns and the desire to achieve social and political change. More specifically, this study revealed that the relationship between selfish participation and interest for the public good is paradoxical, where contradicting motivations do not rule each other out, but rather, coexist. This further indicates the complexity of human psychology and behaviour online, and the fact that audiences cannot be categorized as a single, oversimplified ‘type’, such as narcissists or empowered activists.