Slacktivism and Boston Strong Social Media

I have lived in Boston for about 5 years now; I call it home. There was some kind of distance as the newscasters speculated, a sort of loneliness thinking about how tons of people would hear the news, but so few could actually relate to how I felt as a Bostonian.

But then people started changing their profile pictures on social media. Completely unexpectedly - seeing them actually made me glad.

 

Even though a #prayforboston tweet takes all of 5 seconds for someone to post - reading it makes me know that for at least those 5 seconds, someone cared about Boston - and that makes me happy.

The experience made me think of some other ostensibly shallow internet-only campaigns like the recent gay marriage avatar-changing "slacktivism"

Does the Supreme Court of the USA care about facebook profile images? I'm pretty sure that they don't. Do people who are gay care? I'll bet that they do.

Does the Israeli or Iranian government care about photos their citizens are posting? Maybe not. But do the citizens of those countries care? Yeah, they probably do.

This is so awesome - should we change our profile pictures for everything? Lets not get carried away.