Constantly Contradicting

Alliteration, one of my favorite literary devices!! Everyone consistently changes their mind and performs actions that seem to run counter to beliefs or thoughts. This is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs on the internet on a very regular basis. This connects to social activism in a lot of ways. For instance, if you view several facebook profiles, it is apparent that there is an application called 'causes.' My hypothesis is that people who feel a strong enough cognitive dissonance feeling use this application to decrease the contradiction.

Now I am not saying that people who use the cause application do not believe in the causes they sign up for, rather I am saying the opposite. People have beliefs that are possibly not strong enough to take action in RL. The internet, or in this case Facebook, serves as a location that those individuals can use to express their beliefs. Facebook allows a forum to diminish cognitive dissonance.

While this is a personal phenomenon, it promotes a variety of social activist purposes in the process. This is a completely different type of contradiction: doing something for yourself and doing something for a group. This contradiction can be remedied, though. Helping one's self does not necessarily have to run counter to helping a group of social activists. These two can be integrally intertwined. In this case I would argue that reducing cognitive dissonance and promoting a social cause are actually one in the same and possibly not a contradiction at all.