Conclusion: The Case for Hope, the Path Forward

This chapter firstly discusses how social media facilitates activism, connective action and social change. Social media can contribute to citizen mobilisation and participation. Activism and campaigning become easier and cheaper, expanding activists’ capacity to communicate, coordinate, and mobilise information and society. Characteristics of this new type of connective action include personal expression and voluntary coordination without organisational infrastructure or leadership. The logic of collective action emphasises the important of goal orientation, the high costs of group formation, and groups’ executive power relation to individuals (Papacharissi &Trevey, The Routledge companion to media and activism, Routledge, 2018). This chapter also points to prospects for an improved digital future for generations to come. It considers how social media users are, for good or ill, more digitally immersed and grow up with more access to information and connections.