Mediatizing Activism as a Creative Act: Social Media and the Ice Bucket Challenge Case

In our contemporary political society, people are demanding not only to actively take part of the social sphere as agents, but also they claim the right to express themselves in public (virtual) spaces. According to de Certeau (2010), since very early, a very specific part of society create some “tactics” by which they develop a different use of the products imposed by the dominant culture, i.e., mainstream. These tactics, as creative acts of expression, can be considered as activism acts (Giroux, 2014) and people who are practicing them can be identified as a new form of everyday activists. Nowadays, communication devices, tools and application, such as social media, websites, and more generally the Internet, are being re-appropriated by people who make use of them to disseminate their own contents. Even if people are not claiming them as activists, nor they identify themselves as connected to a particular political movement, by telling their own story and sharing it on the Internet, people are producing and sharing culture in an alternative way to the dominant mainstream communication system. This paper explores the way in which people are using social media and the Internet to disseminate their own stories as forms of everyday activism. The use of creativity for the recent phenomenon of “The Ice Bucket Challenge” is then analysed as a case study.