Friday, 4 September 2015

Rainbow Power!!

Back in June, when someone logged on to Facebook they were bombarded with rainbow filters over pride weekend, allowing millions of people to stand up for their beliefs about marriage equality across the globe. The rainbow filter reached its peak on June 26th with the passing of marriage equality legislation in America  with over 26 million changing their profile picture to reflect their view on the issue (Matias, 2015). Many of these included name actors, celebrities, even politicians, ranging from Russell Simmons to, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff (Kelly, 2014) to name a few. This new innovation spread like wildfire across Facebook because it was a way to empower belief in marriage equality it gave a soft but meaningful voice to a message that was getting people killed, without the threat of physical violence.

As Victoria Kuttainen spoke about in one of her lectures on power and networks “[power] expresses itself in who we are, how we think and how we behave” and how millions of people changed their profile online accentuates this. People changed their established identity by outright saying they support the changes in society through altering the photo that many others use to identify that person. This one filter both literally and figuratively changed how their friends, family, and the world, could and would see them, altering their identity and how they identify themselves (Hanna, Rohm, & Crittenden, 2011). This in itself challenged how people should be constructed, however instead of silencing those narratives that didn’t match the norm (Kuttainen, Narritives and Power, 2015) they were able to be heard, allowing for more thought on the messages those people were trying to say. Not only has it changed ourselves mentally, but behaviourally as well, once being homosexual, bi-sexual, A-sexual, or transsexual was seen as wrong and we acted accordingly. People openly mocked those who didn’t fit into the “heterosexual norm” and they were ostracised, yet with this, behaviour towards it is changing (McNeill, 2012) as the world can finally see that they are no different and deserve the support they can now find online on Facebook.

Bibliography

Hanna, R., Rohm, A., & Crittenden, V. L. (2011). We’re all connected: The power of the social media ecosystem. Business Horizons, 265-273.
Kelly, H. (2014). Facebook rainbow profiles used by 26 million. Retrieved September 3, 2015, from CNN Money: http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/29/technology/facebook-rainbow-profile/
Kuttainen, V. (2015). Narritives and Power. Networks, Narritives and the Making of Place, Lecture 6 Week 6.
Kuttainen, V. (2015). Power and Networks . Networks, Narritives and the Making of Place, Lecture 1 Week 1.
Matias, N. J. (2015, June 2015). Were All Those Rainbow Profile Photos Another Facebook Study? Retrieved September 3, 2015, from The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/were-all-those-rainbow-profile-photos-another-facebook-experiment/397088/
McNeill, L. (2012). There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking and Posthuman Auto/Biography. Biography, 3.


1 comment:

  1. There has been very strong points made in this blog. The use of referencing and the information that used out of those references (to support the given argument), was very well constructed and written out. The use of in text citations, and the format of the blog was always very well completed. One minor improvement that could be used for the next blog written, could be to focus on the strength of the introduction. An example of where strength could be improved (to give more of an impact, which then leads to the reader wanting to know more" is seen in the first sentence, when it sates: "Back in June, when someone logged on to Facebook they were bombarded with rainbow filters over pride weekend, allowing millions of people to stand up for their beliefs about marriage equality across the globe" (Riordan, C. Rainbow Power 2015). Perhaps the use of more a personal take ( in regards to first viewing this outburst of rainbow), could help make the reader be more intrigued to read the rest of the blog.

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