A few months ago, I went on exchange to France, around Paris. It was nice: during the winter, I didn’t have to dress in five layers to shield myself from any wind chill if I wanted to walk outside, and when spring and summer came along, my friends and I would spend our evenings by the Seine. I saw masterpieces every week, whether it was on the walls of museums or through the architecture that shaped the city. Paris is a beautiful place, but I have to admit, I didn’t fall under its spell as deeply as all my friends did. I couldn’t let myself be in love with something that had the ability to charm everyone into falling in love with it.
Paris could never be just mine because it belongs to everyone too. I think that’s one of the reasons why the devastating events in Paris last week resonated with so many people around the world. France is the world’s most popular travel destination, and considering that 22.4 million tourists visited Paris last year – and many more dream of one day seeing the City of Light – that’s a lot of people walking around with a love of Paris.
“Peace for Paris”, created by artist Jean Julien.
The attacks on Paris last week were not the only horrifying events that occurred in that week. If you want to go even further, November 13th, 2015 becomes just a mark that shrinks as we stretch out the timeline of human existence, chock-full of awful things that people have done – and will likely continue to do – to each other because co-existing peacefully on one planet seems to be impossible.
This past week, I have watched my social media feeds become a battleground of its own sort, full of people publishing posts not necessarily targeted towards anyone specific but rather, to this abstract concept of a person who supposedly encompassed any socially “inaccurate” or opposing views.
I personally don’t think that everyone who engages in a social media movement is naïve enough to think that a hashtag or a picture posted is actually supposed to bring about substantial change. If you have constant and consistent access to social media and you’re able to post or share something related to your opinion, you likely come from a privileged position where you have the tools and resources to access social media, a country where your thoughts are allowed to be shared, and you were given an education to form the opinions you have. So I assume that the majority of people in my social media network understand that a simple profile picture change doesn’t equate to real, material change.
There may be some people out there that fully believe this, but it doesn’t matter who or how many because as long as the possibility that this type of person could exist, everyone using a French flag filter became this cohort that needed to be told that their sympathy and expression of solidarity must be disingenuous because it was shown by two clicks of a mouse. If someone states that they care about something, it isn’t necessarily proof that they actually do care. So then why are actions on social media considered the absolute measure of how much someone cares?
Changing your profile picture or hashtagging, and conversely, not being vocal on social media about injustices or world issues, doesn’t diminish the extent that you care about something nor inhibit you from being active in the matter away from your screens.
However, even if all that we can offer right now is our awareness and support, it’s still a contribution of value. In the media, the portrayal of world events and the attention devoted to various issues are skewed and biased. Even if we are knowledgeable about all the awful things that happen in the world, the media inadvertently – and also purposefully – forces the distribution of our support towards certain issues and events.
We aren’t directly confronted by the problems that occur on the other side of the world. How can we be the ones to conclude that our awareness and gestures of solidarity, unless backed by action, doesn’t matter at all to someone else? People do care about where our care goes – look at the outrage over the missing flag option to support Beirut and the lack of personal biographies constructed by the Western media for each victim in the Kenyan university massacre. It would be inaccurate to state that any response and reaction to a devastating or unjust event is trivial if it’s something shared through social media.
No matter how many posts I have read with opinions that diverge from my ideology, it’s still somewhat comforting to know that the social media community I’m a part of can and will become indignant if they think something isn’t right. Our outrage, our emotion, and our care, might only seem static now but it can eventually evolve into the change that we’re seeking as we figure out all the ways we can make a significant difference.