It’s mid-June, we’re still bored out of our minds in isolation and I have just taken out my phone to do some therapeutic mindless scrolling on Instagram. Whilst expecting selfies and couple pics I am instead met with a feed bulging to the top with the widest range of current day causes: from the functions of the current day Prison Industrial Complex to the way in which the British primary school Education System needs to be decolonised. Whilst I expected to have scrolled about what other families are doing during lockdown or throwbacks to an easier and more fun filled time I instead finish my scroll having read five different Op-eds written by my very own friends, signed three petitions and shared five hashtags on my Instagram story. Instagram is no longer a place for me and my friends to be mindless but instead the exact opposite: it now harbours mindfulness and is our outlet for us to post our politics.
“this is our world, these injustices are our injustices”
So, thanks to lockdown, we have found our activism. Our social media generation which has in the past been ridiculed for our disengagement in politics has now been politically radicalised due to the role of social media in lockdown. Yes, we’re not our parent’s generation flaunting flower crowns or screaming to punk music in anti-war demonstrations but we are instead flaunting petitions and news articles from our bedrooms and becoming educated through the screens that once forced us into laziness.
The News, current affairs and social injustices once felt like something inaccessible to our generation and belonged to those adults who still can be bothered to read newspapers because ‘nothing changes anyway’. However through Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok, the lockdown has in fact led to an unlocking of young people’s interests in affairs. Making us understand that this is our world, these injustices are our injustices and although we don’t get our news from that old white man reporting on Radio One we can instead create and spread the news ourselves through our own social medias .
“Thought is now applied to every post made with hyper-attention to people not posting political .”
Our outside world was put on pause forcing us to stop posting about parties and starting posting about political parties and their manifestoes, to stop worrying about Instagram filters and start worrying about the way we filter out different voices and forcing us to stop focusing on what pic we’d post on our Instagram stories and start focusing on whose stories we’re hearing and whose deserve more attention.
It goes without saying that the world of Instagram has been transformed. Thought is now applied to every post made with hyper-attention to people not posting political . Of course, it’s okay to post a picture of you and your friends but it’s not all that you should be posting anymore. We’ve learnt to start counting votes on petitions instead of likes, to start promoting NGOs fighting for justice every day instead of just promoting ourselves and to start making our voices heard.
The old age aphorism goes “children should be seen but not heard” but well, the children, the youth, the generation Z, millennials, screenagers, good for nothings who have access to everything with the swipe of a thumb teens are now, thanks to lockdown, not only being heard but the world is starting to listen up. We’ve learnt to transform the digital platforms from once enslaving us to mindless scrolling to instead expanding our voices so now we’ll never stop being heard.
Lily Sheldon
Featured image courtesy of dole777 via Unsplash.