#BlackLivesMatter

The "Shot Heard Round the World"- the first line in the Concord Hymn by Ralph Emerson to describe the impending moments that began the American Revolution. Almost 240 years later the United States has witnessed a new revolution but this grassroots movement is not demanding the emancipation of an institutional monarch but rather the enfranchisement from an embedded institutional racism.

After a young black man, named Michael Brown, was wrongfully shot and killed in Ferguson Missouri, the small city became a hub for activism under the banner #BlackLivesMatter, which has also sparked an organized global political and social movement. The 21st century act of violence, which also brought global attention was not circulated through a written text but rather broadcasted through a digital outlet, never imagined by those alive during the first American Revolution. Unlike the first revolution, this second grassroots movement is not being played out on a distant battle field but rather through a digital medium such as Facebook and Twitter, which was made available through the creation of the Internet.

Prior to the Internet and social media, if urgent news had to be publicized about a particular incident, individuals would have to rely on mainstream media corporations to broadcast the message. As quoted by Wired in their piece, Social Media Helps Black Lives Matter Fight the Power, by Bijan Stephen, 

              "In the 1960s, if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you 

                needed to get some urgent news out to the rest of the world- word of a beating or an 

               activist's arrest or some brewing state of danger- you would likely head straight for a 

              

               telephone... in other words, it took a lot of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going

               

                on in the streets of the Jim Crow South." 

However, it was in the mass media's hands to decide whether the incident would be "news" worthy or not, and this determination was largely affected by the interests and biases of each media corporation. Thus, for a large social movement to be successful it is predominantly shaped by the technology available to those in charge of the movement, in order for it to tailor its goals, tactics and rhetoric with the media available (Bijan 2015).  

Social media has provided an arena for individuals to post videos and their insights without the struggles of providing the video to a media station. In a way every individual with a smart phone is a citizen journalists, they bring to light the wrong doings by state actors, without the fears of corporate and political agents. Like Martin Luther King Jr. mentions in New York in 1965, during the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, "We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners...we're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television"(Bijan 2015). With social media, no longer did activists have to force the spotlight on a particular incident, social media would be the avenue where citizen journalists could post live and raw footage. Citizen media would be the continuos spotlight for which institutional actors would be perpetually surveyed. 

However, though citizen media does provide a certain level of visibility and did have a certain measure of success for the Black Lives Matter movement, for example it "helped pressure the federal government to investigate police practices in Ferguson and Baltimore....and [helped create] an offshoot...movement, a project called Campaign Zero" (Bijan 2015). 

However, this it will need a certain level of institutional support in order to be sustainable and have an actual tangible affect on society. Citizen media has helped bring the issue to attention but "the movement doesn't win if there's only a small set of people who understand the solutions...the movement wins when there's a broad understanding that we need a system that doesn't kill people, when a critical mass of citizens can envision what that looks like" (Bijan 2015). Therefore, citizen media provides a brief and at times strong spotlight but if actual change is going to occur, institutions needs to support the movement as well.