Be the # you want to see

IF you are wearing different protest hats (both literally and figuratively), could you be the mascot of a cause-hopping generation?

“Nowadays you can pick and choose your social movements,” says Professor Hlonipha Mokoena of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg.

“Today you can be Black Lives Matter, tomorrow you can wear your pussy hat, and the next day you can be marching for equal pay. This is how politics has become a leisure activity. Everyone’s looking for the next hashtag.”

If we have politics as leisure, we have Instagram to document all the cause-hopping going on.

“That is what I see on Instagram,” Mokoena says, “people identifying with a dozen causes. Fifty years ago, that would have been unheard of.”

She describes this as a “peculiar problem of the 21st century”.

The “completely radical” development was the advent of wearable and portable devices which meant people were “attached to media and messages all day” and were thus mired in political anxiety, “constantly looking for something noble to attach themselves to”.

Think of the flood of glamorous photos Instagrammed during the Boko Haram mass abduction in Nigeria — every wannabe celeb was seen in haute couture holding a placard demanding “bring back our girls”.

Problems can then arise when attachment to a cause — however flippant — sows the seeds of division among people who might otherwise share common views.

But don’t rush to blame the internet. A recently published study in the US found that the “growth in polarisation in recent years is largest for the demographic groups least likely to use the internet and social media”.

People older than 75 were found to be far more politically polarised than those between 18 and 39.

Said lead researcher Levi Boxell from Stanford University: “These facts argue against the hypothesis that the internet is a primary driver of rising political polarisation.”

For local designer Gavin Rajah, the nuanced spaces between polarised views are where South Africans need to search for meaning.

“Attaching yourself to a cause shouldn’t just be for the feel-good element of being part of a global group,” he says. “The biggest driver should be about looking at the context and what is happening in our own country.”

Rajah says the support shown locally for the anti-Trump and antisexism movements was “great”, and it was “amazing to see sisterhoods cutting across race and socio-economics”, but, he adds, “our focus should be what is affecting women here in our own country”.

Then again, he says, “anything that adds to the momentum and visibility of a protest” can only be healthy. — Tanya Farber