Young people are using live TV as a tool for activism

TIME

Billie Eilish received a lot of attention for bringing awareness to climate change by wearing a “No Music on a Dead Planet" shirt during her American Music Awards performance. Students and alumni who disrupted Saturday's Harvard-Yale football game received even more attention, even though few were actually watching the game on ESPNU. As Judy Berman points out, "this weekend’s spectacles hinted at how a generation growing up on social media might go about using live TV for change. As streaming increasingly overtakes linear television and viewership of even live events like sports and award shows shrinks, Gen Z activists seem to realize that such telecasts are only as effective as the unscripted, viral moments that come out of them. Raised on memes, with their simple, economical juxtapositions of image and text, they’re also capable of crafting (or appropriating) pithy statements that are as easy to get stuck in your head as the lyrics of pop songs. Along with the message about the climate crisis comes a message about technology: The whole world is still watching—it’s just doing so on the tiny screen of a mobile device set on silent."