Activism is an effort by an individual person or a group of people to work towards a change; it could be social, political, economic or environmental. Activism could mean writing an article for the newspaper or organizing rallies and marching on the streets, protesting about an issue. However, the meaning of activism has been slightly altered with the emergency of social media. Social media sites are a powerful medium, which now being used commonly by many to talk or discuss about the current issues happening locally and all over the world. Now anyone who changes their status, shares information or even just tweets about an issue that concerns them affects them as well as the society and creates awareness about it can be called an activist.
In my project I will be talking about political campaigning, a form of activism which is used to create a change in the political structure and the use of social media by the political parties as an important tool to reach out to its voters by providing information about themselves, their parties goals and work towards creating awareness about their campaigns. Also, I would like to touch on the topic of social media playing a major role in making the campaigning process much more transparent and giving the public the power of speaking out on through the use of these sites and being more involves, thus working towards a more democratic structure. For this project I am talking the example of the on going election in India to highlight the importance of social media in campaigning and reaching out to the public.