Virtual Activism - Waste of time?

Activism in many ways helps provide society with a deeper view of reality. The causes that people support today tend to have a goal, which usually changes a portion of society for the better. People most of the time support causes through first-hand activism; however, a new type of activism is arising through virtual reality. Is this new form of activism more effective or less effective?

The project that I am going to discuss is the “Anti-War Protest and RootsCamp” project. This project was about a real life organization named RootsCamp, who decided to take their protest against the war to the virtual world. This project serves the same purpose of a real life protest, which is to get more supporters; a statement from one of the characters in the video displays: “Invite others. Keep the movement strong.” The project also had a lot of other issues which involved George Bush, fascism, and generally war. This project interests me because I find it controversial as to whether these virtual war protests have any effect in reality at all. I can sort of understand that in reality it may be hard to reach protestors of war in the country in which the war is taking place; and the only way to reach them is through a virtual world; however, in my opinion trying to gain supporters from a person’s own country through a virtual world seems sort of pointless.

Here’s an example of why I think it is pointless. In the virtual world, where there are many users who are cut off from their real lives, with the substitution of their virtual lives, do show a promising number of users in which a group can gain support because it was pointed out in one of the videos that the number of users did increase drastically; however, even if an organization does gain the support of many users, how many of those users will actually disconnect themselves from the virtual world to actually join the same organization in the real world because we all know that supporting an organization in a fake world has no meaning due to the fact that politicians probably don’t use Second Life and/or don’t have the time to use Second Life because of their priorities in their real lives.

An organization in the real world named the Breast Cancer Foundation proves to be effective in gaining support because Breast Cancer can occur in about half of the population of this world (I don’t know the ratio of men to women in the world). However, my point is that if the Breast Cancer Foundation was to use Second Life or any other virtual world to gain supporters, it would be a waste of time, because spending time in the virtual world takes away from the real world; if the supporters are willing to spend more time in a virtual world, they are obviously willing to spend less time in the real world where the support really has an effect because like I stated earlier, how many of the supporters will actually leave the virtual world to spend more time in the real world’s organization.