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Lidia Naskova — 2 Comments
27
Oct 15

Online environmental activism– does it work or not?

By Lidia Naskova

“You can send a press release, and it’s maybe not something media outlets will pursue as a story. But when six million people have seen it, they’ll cover it”

(Travis Nichols, Arctic communications manager at Greenpeace in The Columbia Journalism Review, November, 2014).

The benefits of using media activism online are many nowadays and I found two very interesting examples of where smart online media strategies may help social movement organizations to get messages rapidly out to the public, alter the public opinion about a matter or raise awareness, and consequently changing decisions with the help from the pressure from consumers.

In 2014, the environmental organization Greenpeace launched a YouTube video that was part of a campaign set out to pressure the company Lego to dissociate them from a partnership with the oil-company Shell that had been going on since the 1960s. Greenpeace targeted Lego as a part of a viral protest against Shell’s plans to drill after oil in the Arctic, and in the video, Lego characters were demonstratively placed in a Lego-built Arctic getting slowly covered with oil, along with the slogan that “Lego: everything is NOT awesome”. Continue reading →

Christos Mavraganis — 1 Comment
19
Oct 15

Social m-INDIA

by Christos Mavraganis

Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi is going… social and he proved that during his trip at the ‘mecca of technology’, Silicon Valley.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speak on stage during a town hall at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California

Narendra Modi with Mark Zuckerberg – Reuters

On September 29th 2015, Modi became the first Indian head of state who visited California since Indira Ghandi in 1982 and he had a meeting with Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the headquarters of the world’s most powerful social network.  Continue reading →

Christos Mavraganis — 2 Comments
26
Sep 15

The borders of human dignity

by Christos Mavraganis

aylan1

Aylan Kurdi as an angel – Reuters

The historians of the future will probably refer to the year 2015 as the outburst of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The war in Syria is in full swing and as a result thousands of Syrian citizens are playing -on a daily basis- the ‘russian roulette’ of escaping the country, mostly by boats. Italy and Greece are the first destinations, before the big dream of the so called developed Europe. This phenomenon, which is related to multiple development issues, is not of course something new. Continue reading →