PSA: Victims’ Voice Matters And They Deserve To Be Heard Both Online and Offline!

Social media is an important platform to let people’s voices get heard, especially for groups of oppressed people. It helps activism move to digital space, which helps raise awareness of specific issues more broadly. Jinsook Kim’s article – Sticky Activism articulates the importance of digital activism. In this article, Kim illustrates the Gangnam Station Feminicide and uses the interview to analyze how this incident became a pivotal moment to help raise awareness around gender, misogyny and feminism in South Korean society.

What happened?

The incident happened in the Gangnam District – the central business center of Seoul. The murderer, a Korean man, had stabbed a woman to death in a public bathroom near Gangnam subway station. The media initially reported it as a “random killing” because, allegedly, the murderer did not know this woman. However, because the victim is a woman, many Korean women have expressed concern about Korea’s long-rooted misogyny culture, and ultimately has become an activism both online and offline.

Copy from Los Angles Times, 2016.

Sticky Activism:

After the incident, massive vigil events were hosted across the countries, especially in the Gangnam District. People who came to the vigils wrote their thoughts and prayers on sticky notes and stuck them in public spaces to express their emotions to the victim. Many of these sticky notes are written by women who are survivors of sexual assaults and abuse, which helped motivate more and more discussion regarding Korean misogyny culture online. Those sticky notes help raise awareness of people in Korea, even internationally have become a form of activism; Kim coined this “Sticky Note Activism,” later “Sticky Activism.” Kim uses the word “sticky” to emphasize the “stickiness” of the movement in scholarly discussion. According to Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “stickiness” relates to a media’s ability to capture and maintain individuals’ attention and involvement. It is sometimes used in contrast to the concept of “spreadability.” Sticky Activism eventually evolved to be both sticky and spreadable with the help of both online and offline.

Opinion:

Kim’s article regarding sticky note activism in response to the Gangnam station incident teaches us how to make our voices heard online and offline. Victims’ voices matter, but how we can let them stick and spread is the question that digital activists need to evaluate. Sticky activism gives us a perfect example of what modern-day activism should be. From sticky notes to online discourses, they eventually grasped the authorities’ attention to embed laws and regulations to protect women from sexual assaults and abuses. Sticky note activism is undoubtedly successful. It combines the merits of online and offline activism, which can spread people’s voices, and those voices can stick to their minds.

Copy from BBC News, 2022.

Sticky activism should be the future form of activism. And here’s why:

There are pros and cons when it comes to online and offline activism. It is a good idea that activists nowadays utilize social media to raise awareness on specific issues. Because social media is easy to form an activist movement by creating accounts and hashtags, online activism can grasp more people’s attention quickly due to the spreadability of social media. However, online activism nowadays is saturated, especially as numerous news and information updates every minute on social media, and people become less empathetic toward tragedy and victims. Resulting in people hardly resonating with online activism; thus, doing activism online is not enough to stick in people’s minds; people can use their fingers to scroll it away. Unlike online activism, offline or in-real-life activism can grasp people’s attention immediately, for instance, protesting, walking outs, and making signs because those are real people fighting real unjust issues; people have more empathy toward authenticity and living beings. However, this conventional way of activism is limited geographically. They can only raise awareness on local issues but can’t travel or spread out internationally to grab more people’s attention. Sticky activism learns from both online and offline activism. It makes victims’ voices heard online and offline. It helps the offline emotion and authenticity shift online to raise public awareness of the issues.

Overall, Kim’s essay gives us a great analysis of sticky activism - - combines both online and offline to make movements spread and stick. We all understand that victims’ and oppressed social groups’ voices matter. But how can we let the voices be heard? I think sticky activism has already answered, utilizing online and offline resources because those voices deserve to be heard online and offline.