Within the past five years, social media applications have provided an accessible platform for many popular movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the Women’s March to begin spreading their message. However, it has become increasingly difficult for small movements- ideas that have just begun to bloom- to build deep roots amongst so many trending topics that seem to leave as rapidly as they came. When addressing this question, Twitter was the first app that came to my mind, but I realize it is not specific to a cause. Though it has served as the jumping-off point for many recent calls for social change, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were such a site specifically addressing these topics in real time.

A quick search of “social justice app” brought me to quite the list of websites, including The New Yorker and Tech.co; the one I found most interesting, however, is web-based app called CrowdVoice. This website and its corresponding app are specifically designed to “track voices of protest.”

The site hosts both “feature voices” and “current voices” with an array of headlines featuring protests and grassroots movements, both nationally and internationally. This could be useful for those seeking to share a cause they a working passionately to build via the app’s “Add A Voice” option, or useful for researchers like me, not only looking for popular causes, but those that have not bloomed via social network.

The website is effective due to both its usability and accessibility; the home page features between eight and ten current protest headlines. These headlines are followed by statistics that are easy to read and categorically organized by recent updates, new facts, or feature stories.  

Website like CrowdVoice allow for interested parties to not only better understand what is happening in the world around them, but to plant the seeds of meaningful change in movements that affect them in an arena that is much easier to navigate than a traditional social media site like Facebook or Twitter.

Within my writing, much of the content, of the ideas I am exploring, finds roots in other people’s ideas. Social movements are the creative work of one person or a group’s ideas on love, on religion, on economics…

All of that is to say, that in its simplest context, I find my words and inspiration to write at the hands of other people. Without the ideas that spurred movements like Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March, I would not have the means to produce new content: original content that is inspired by other’s original content. The line of ideas can be traced back far before this blog had even been considered.

James Boyle poses this within his question of the Public Domain:

“But does intellectual property work this way now, promoting the ideal of progress, a transparent marketplace, easy and cheap access to information, decentralized and iconoclastic cultural production, self-correcting innovation policy?”

On a larger scale, specifically within professional writing how many times does a writer ask “Am I allowed to use this? I don’t want to get in trouble.” I would say the number is infinite. With the creation of new content, there is always the question of whether or not the use of information will result in penalty.

In her TEDxMaastricht presentation, Animator Nina Paley goes on to present the idea of “Permission Culture.” In her terms, the less information flows, the more it stagnates; evolution, progress, and innovation stall. All of this, she insists is due to the control of what information comes in, and in return, what flows out.

With this in mind, I believe that original thought cannot be a product of a world without free information flow. Through this, the ideas that spawn from a piece of writing, a song, an art piece, can then lead society to address larger social themes and create meaningful involvement within a culture.