This week’s lecture on the intersection of public art and social movements was interesting and relevant to me as this is an area I have experience studying through unique courses at Duke. In particular, I took a class called Social Media/Social Movements last year, as a Visual Media Studies elective with Professor Negar Mottahedeh. Each week, we would discuss different movements that have been started and grown on social media, whether it was Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. One movement that we discussed in this class was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that took over social media last summer. I thought of this movement due to the lecture’s discussion on the Black Lives Matter movement, which began on social media and started as a hashtag on Twitter. The Ice Bucket Challenge also began and grew on social media, and it was basically a movement in which someone dumps a bucket of ice water on their head, and then nominates someone else to do the same in order to promote awareness of the disease ALS and to encourage donations to research. This went viral on social media and brought a lot of attention to the movement at the time, but has since died down. I thought this was an interesting parallel to draw, as the Black Lives Matter movement continues to trend on social media and be relevant due to the continued mistreatment of black people by the police. However, I wonder if once these acts hopefully die down, if this movement will slowly fade, just as the Ice Bucket Challenge did. I think that this shows the danger and risks of using social media to create a movement, as it has the potential of only being relevant for a short period of time, before the next big socially relevant issue occurs.
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