Person Of The Year Prediction From Forbes: The Slacktivist [Infographic]
Time Magazine’s yearly event where they announce the person of the year is pretty well known, but what is less well known; to me at least, is Forbes Magazine’s yearly prediction of who that person of the year will be, and they have come out with their prediction for 2012.
It is Forbes’ prediction that the “2012 Time ‘Person’ of the Year Is: The Slacktivist.
Huh?
What the hell is a slacktivist?
Well according to Wikipedia this is what the term slacktivist means:
“a term that describes feel-good measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that has little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist.”
In other words it is people who instead of actually get off their asses and do something to make change or take part in real efforts to help or otherwise get thruly and physically involved in one fashion or another decide that they are doing their part by sticking some silly little memento on their social media avatar, or click on some Like button, or follow some brand or movement page.
While for the most part this is just a feel-good thing there are times when enough slacktivists band together in such large numbers that they can actually bring about change or at the very least invigorate those with influence to become involved. A good example of this is the recent SOPA and PIPA movements that saw the defeat of some really bad pieces of legislation.
via Bit Rebels / Sortable
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About the Author
Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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