Social Media's Influence on ALS Awareness Campaigns

Although social media has only been around for the past two decades it has changed the way the world runs today. Social media is a new form of communication, entertainment, campaigning, and activism that helps to spread news or information more broadly and faster than before. A recent way social media has been used to spread awareness of an issue was in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. With the use of Facebook and YouTube the Ice Bucket Challenge had unbelievable results. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Before 1939, when the most popular baseball player of his time, Lou Gehrig, was diagnosed with ALS not

In an article written by Nathan Slauer, the author interviewed the writer Arielle Pardes who commented “’there are a lot of things wrong with the Ice Bucket Challenge, but the most annoying is that it 's basically narcissism masked as altruism.’” Pardes implies that most of the people who participated in the challenge were doing it to seem like good people to others on social media, instead of doing it out of the goodness of their heart or to benefit the ALS cause. Slauer continues with that topic discussing the issues with how the challenge was carried out, “Building real awareness involves more than just saying that a problem exists. It means educating people on what that problem is, why their participation in ending the problem matters, and, most importantly, showing people how they can get involved with the cause in a more consistent, meaningful manner than one-time donation” (Opinion: Ice Bucket Challenge raises concerns, Nathan Slauer). By having these short thirty second videos of ice water being dumped on a person’s head, it is not enough time to educate people correctly on why they should care or how they can help. The videos could have been a little longer and told people that they can donate to help fight ALS at alsa.org or say that it affects about 20,000 Americans at any given time (ALS Association). These little facts would have helped raise awareness of ALS facts more than dumping water on their head, but people want to go with the trend and the trend did not include educating, so it was not done. Even without donation specifics in the videos, the ALS Association raised $115 million over the course of the challenge; however, many questioned how and where the money raised was used to help fight the