Modern technology and media allow us to do things that were previously unimaginable. With a click of a button, you can communicate with thousands of people almost instantaneously. Now political groups, businesses, individuals and social movements can be heard by simply “friending” a page or by having them pop up in your newsfeed. Not only are they heard, but they are given feedback by the public! This form of free advertising has truly reinvented how we get our news and become involved with political movements. Our broken food system requires political action! Political action mandates organisation and participation. These two things stem from awareness and communication, and can be generally accomplished by spreading the word through social media.
It has been proven that social media increases people’s action towards protest: “Statistical analysis that using social media frequently is positively and significantly related to protest..” (Valenzuela, 2013). But how does it do this? Certain pages on facebook (an individual or group) dedicated to social/political causes often post news articles or videos pertain to their field of activism. Take for instance the Mike Brown shooting which happened recently. The plethora of news stories spreading around the web sparked raucous political debate on everyone’s feed. Nearly everyone had an opinion on it. Of course something this provocative was trending, but what about other pressing issues such as national hunger or the dilapidation of local food systems? Where do I go to find news on these topics? For someone who is interested in the subject, but has not taken a food system class like the one we are in, you would have to do a lot of digging on google.
Valenzuela outlines three ‘mediating mechanisms’ in social media that is intertwined with protest behavior standards: a source of news, a source of political expression, and a way to join political or social causes. These are all important elements in the current local food movements here in Eugene. Last year when a group orchestrated an anti-GMO protest, not only did they go into our classes and tell us, put there was a page that was popping up on my feed reminding me when it was going to take place. After the GMO bill didn’t pass, I posted a debate status on my wall and got 73 comments of people voicing their opinions on the bill. Last night when I was researching FNB, I found the local Eugene page uses its status posts to organize meetings at the Lorax in order to gather enough people to cook. These three instances fit well into the criteria set for us by Valenzuela. In fact, I would have to say that our city’s food movements are entirely dependent on social media to organize and inform.
Of course, movements such as these cannot be entirely dependent on technology and social media as a form of communication. As Valenzuela points out, ‘there is the risk of furthering inequality if the population of social media users is skewed toward the
technologically savvy and those with high human, social, and economic capital.’ As a city, Eugene has a high rate of homelessness and lower income households. We must remember that technology is a privilege and in using these tools, we are not incorporating many of the people that food issues directly affect. As a community we must be careful to not utilize only one form of communication. That would be like only planting one crop for an entire population… Flyers, public speakings and classroom discussions are still valid forms of ways to garner interest in important issues.
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/foodsystems/files/2013/09/Valenzuela-z4e0bg.pdf