For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And sometimes, each is irritating in its own way.
I didn’t change my profile picture or Twitter avatar to [the red equal sign](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/29/red-equal-sign-facebook_n_2980489.html). In fact, I pretty much never participate in mass social media movements. But I’m also not the type to speak out against it. For me, [it’s exhausting](http://www.theonion.com/articles/supreme-court-on-gay-marriage-sure-who-cares,31812/?ref=auto) to first defend the issue and then defend the movement about the issue.
But the debate about the movement rather than the issue does pose a good question: How important is it to show your support through a shared link or common profile picture?
Melanie Tannenbaum, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Illinois, [wrote a piece](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/03/28/marriage-equality-and-social-proof/) for Scientific American about power of peer pressure. She argues showing support through social media contributes to making an issue like gay marriage more socially acceptable. Social proof, in that context, _is_ doing something.
But where does the desire to circumvent the issue itself in favor of this seemingly irrelevant debate about whether people are “doing something” in showing their support? As far as I can tell, the people throwing out those accusations usually support the cause in question. Yet they still have to voice some contrary opinion, as if they have some kind of ego aversion to admitting their support if it’s part of a mass movement.
Sorry, folks… Changing your profile picture isn’t going to accomplish anything.
— VileBracken (@KyleBracken) March 26, 2013
I’m about 1200% sure that changing your facebook profile picture isn’t going to accomplish anything.
— Nikole (@NikoleBear) March 26, 2013
Dear Facebook fools, quit changing your damn profile pictures to red equals signs. You accomplish nothing, nobody cares.
— Phil(@gpellis87) March 26, 2013
Oh _really?_ I never realized how informed you are! Please, tell me more about how the government, policy and social change work.
We talk about this concept of cognitive dissonance in my communications classes often. If you ask someone for their opinion on a topic, they will come up with an opinion, regardless of whether they know anything about the subject, because they do not wish to seem uninformed. Then, if presented with information contrary to the opinion they came up with, they will likely still defend their initial opinion to avoid cognitive dissonance. People hate to feel wrong (which is perhaps why I would just rather post nothing than fall prey to criticism).
Here’s a proposition: The people who are arguing about the movement know enough about the issue to maybe know they’re on one side, but perhaps they also know they aren’t doing anything about the issue the allegedly care about. Showing social support is scraping the surface of “doing something,” and maybe they feel people shouldn’t get to feel good about that. To decrease the uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance, they have to say something.
Telling people they aren’t actually doing anything also just further detracts from the issue. But it is worth noting that not all naysayers are doing so just to stand out. Presenting political and social issues as two-sided would be a false dilemma, but expanding the argument isn’t the problem for me.
Do the critics of social media movements want participants to be working in policy? What exactly counts as a true “accomplishment”? Furthermore, I don’t think they would call a physical showing of support, such as the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a waste of time or lack of accomplishment.
Perhaps it’s the fear of being wrong that keeps people from being genuine. Sarcasm and dissent feel bulletproof, as if, as Christy Wampole [wrote in her New York Times editorial](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/), to “live ironically is to hide in public.” Perhaps social media needs a boost of genuine, well-thought-out opinions — you know, the stuff of which memes are made. What if, rather than reblogging, we committed to writing our own opinions?