User:TwistedPuppets/sandbox

Misuse of water
The Ice Bucket Challenge has been widely criticized for wasting unnecessarily large amounts of usable drinking water.

While the act of dumping a bucket of ice water on people and filming it does promote the cause with the videos going viral on social media sites, the amount of water used brought to light a worldwide water shortage. Not only were there droughts across the globe before, such as developing nations or California, however after the Ice Bucket Challenge there have been droughts in places where water was plentiful before, such as Scotland. A columnist by the name of Noah Frank criticized the Ice Bucket Challenge in a post on WTOP.com by saying “This is, quite frankly, an insult to the parts of the world that have little or no drinking water readily available.”

There are some who have lived in places where water is scarce, like Tom Murphy, who explains that he would not feel right pouring out water because he “cannot forget its importance for so many people.”

Media Activism
The Ice Bucket Challenge shows the theory of social media activism because it relies on different media platforms to further its cause of getting donations, knowledge, and awareness out about the disease ALS. It also focuses on the participation of people to create a social movement by utilizing posts, images, and videos.

Many people have criticized the Ice Bucket Challenge based on the fact that it is bringing in huge sums of money for one cause when there are other causes in the world wreaking more havoc for more population and more common diseases. The Ice Bucket Challenge is taking the limelight and narrowing people’s focus down to only one cause.

Another criticism being brought up is the Ice Bucket Challenge becomes a way to politically seem like you are making a stand without actually changing your real viewpoint. People are taking the videos as face value and are not actually looking into who is in the video and their viewpoints on the cause. As some mention some of the participants actually oppose funding on ALS but participate in the Ice Bucket Challenge. That poses a moral dilemma that is being bypassed because of the reasoning that if they are in the video they must support the whole cause.

Participatory Culture
Participatory culture is when the consumers not only consume a product but help it adapt.

With participatory culture you are getting audiences to participate more and become part of the digital world. This is helpful with the success of movements who base the results around the digital media. This allows people to free express their options in a way they feel the cause is being helped. Since these movements are using social media participants are able to be more active in helping.

The Ice Bucket Challenge can be linked to participatory culture because consumers are actively engaging in the movement and posting videos to their social media accounts of their choice. It also makes it easy to participate. Using ice water makes the challenge low cost financially so that you do not need to spend a lot of money on the materials and you are able to use a recording device that people have on their phones, computers, and or cameras. The way the Ice Bucket Challenge videos were able to change and people could come up with unique ways to complete the challenge made participation easy. The videos elicited feel good emotions and it helped people watch and produce them as they found they were contributing to a good moral cause.