The Ice Bucket Challange

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When doing research for this week on activism seen on social media, my first thought went towards things like protesting and fighting for rights.  But, a quick Google search reminded me of a famous movement from a few years ago that is a great example of activism that was started thanks to social media.

A few years ago, we all saw viral videos of celebrities, athletes, and our friends and family pouring ice water on them all in the name of fighting ALS.  The disease targets the nervous system and causes irreversible muscle failure.  There still is no cure and no real consensus on what causes it.  In 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge was started and spread across every social media site as people would challenge their friends to pour ice water on themselves to bring awareness to ALS and help raise money for more research.  The challenge was able to raise over $115 million for ALS research.  This fun challenge united a huge amount of people and brought awareness to a disease many were not aware of.

The Ice Bucket Challenge is a wonderful example of how powerful social media can be to unite us all over a common goal.  I think one of the reasons that this was so successful was that the simple idea behind this challenge was hope.  Hope to bring awareness to the disease and hope to conduct more research to find a cure.  There were no politics involved, no red vs blue, no poor vs rich, just people genuinely wanting to help out other people.

Comments

  1. The WeaveJuly 17, 2022 at 8:19 AM

    Great example! I participated in that challenge along with all the others! lol There are so many examples of this out there. A couple of years ago a friend of mine had a student who wore a self-made University of Tennessee shirt to school on "team spirit" day. As you can imagine, some other students picked on him. My friend posted about it , and before she knew it, it BLEW UP. I mean, all over the interwebs. The University sent a whole care package and more - AND they created a licensed school shirt of this kids design! Such a great example of how we can come together through socials. Here is the link to the story if you want to read about it.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/07/us/bullied-student-university-of-tennessee-shirt-trnd/index.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. “You are much stronger than you think you are. Trust me.”July 17, 2022 at 11:27 AM

    What a great example of the power of people coming to fruition using social media tools. I sit in meetings where the impacts and how to use social media is discussed at great lengths, but i much prefer to hear and read about the people making it happen over the organization. Way cool.

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