Social media and civic engagement
Introduction
In recent times social media has been used to promote a host of causes such as famine, earthquakes, tornado, hurricane and other natural disasters. Such moments have showed that social media can extend and offer support when need arises by mobilizing individuals to pull together and get people working towards a common goal of helping people. In my paper I intend to examine how social media plays a role in civic engagement and activist ins society by highlighting the greatest social media initiative in Kenya dubbed Kenyans for Kenyan.
In the year 2011 a devastating drought developed in Kenya was described as the worst drought to ever take place in a period of 60 years. The effects were felt as by mid-year close to 4 million Kenyans lacked food and water supply with a close to half a million children face acute malnutrition. Death by starvation was bound to happened if the drought persisted. It took corporate heads to join their heads and come up with a quick response to address the situation (Osano, 2012). The country wasn’t prepared for this and therefore other ways or soliciting support had to be revised.
Corporate heads and other influential leaders launched the Kenyans for keyan campaign which immediately gained immerse support on social media. The campaign was top trending on twitter in the period it ran as well as Facebook. Pictures spread like bushfires on the situation affecting the eastern part of the nation thanks to social media. It was only a matter of time and each and every individual actually understood the situation. Twitter and Facebook, one of the most used social media platforms had the greatest impact in spreading the news, people donated foodstuffs and money towards the campaign. The campaign collected a total of $5.5 million in cash with exclusion of the foodstuffs donated the latter contribution amounting to $11 million was planned to empower individuals in arid and semi-arid areas empowering them on how to produce their own food and effectively gain their own food sustainability.
Conclusion
In our case we get to see a case where social media actually helped salvage the situation. It mobilized people to contribute whatever they had and effectively help save their fellow country men from starvation. Its safe to conclude that social media offers a wider platform and in this case its quite easy to offer civic engagement.