Glenn (2015) Activism or “Slacktivism?”: Digital Media and Organizing for Social Change, Communication Teacher, Volume 29, Number 2, 3 April 2015, pp. 81-85,  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2014.1003310

Harlow, Summer; Guo, Lei (2014) Will the Revolution be Tweeted or Facebooked? Using Digital Communication Tools in Immigrant Activism, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 19, Number 3, 1 April 2014, pp. 463-478.  

Schumann, Sandy; Klein, Olivier (2015) Substitute or stepping stone? Assessing the impact of low‐threshold online collective actions on offline participation, European Journal of Social Psychology, Volume 45, Number 3, 1 April 2015, pp. 308-322.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2084

Lim (2013) Many Clicks but Little Sticks: Social Media Activism in Indonesia, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Volume 43, Number 4, 1 November 2013, pp. 636-657. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2013.769386

Nowadays there is a trend to slacktivism. It is "cool" to support great initiatives and many clickers can salve their consiences.

It's up to us - educators and teacher - to sensitize our next generation that a click is one thing and to act in real world is another thing. It's a perfect topic to be discussed with students.   

The revolutions in the Middle East in recent years, which were coordinated via social media, riots in Ferguson, Missouri, that were stimulated by Twitter, and other recent events show that social media certainly an be used for social action.

But simply "making this your status for an hour" or other things you define as "Slacktivism" have little true impact because they are very low engagement.  

They may have SOME impact, such as the rainbow profile pictures associated with the US Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage.  Anecdotally, the rainbow profiles greatly concerned some social conservatives, because so many people were doing it.

slacktivism can hurt “real” civic actions such as protests, community volunteerism, and charity. Slacktivism may also substitute other civic actions because the people’s inner urge to take action has been satisfied by their participation in the low-cost online action

http://faculty.washington.edu/garyhs/docs/lee-chi2013-slacktivism.pdf

On the other hand, consider the "ice bucket challenge" which raised a huge amount of money for ALS Association.

Previous studies seems to come out with inconclusive results. I think there is a complex and dynamic mechanism underlying the relationship between offline and online political participation. Anyway, I am now working on this topic for my PhD project. Cheers!

I don't think slacktivism detracts from activism.  As some of the scholars who have already responded have pointed out, engagement with political issues via social media can lead to genuine activism, such as in the cases of the Arab spring, ALS ice bucket challenge, or the Black Lives Matter movement.  The ease of use of social media probably means that people will simply click "like" or "share" to highlight an issue they care about without doing anything further.  However, I doubt they are doing this instead of going out and engaging in activism.  For those who are motivated to activism, slacktivism is unlikely to be a substitute. In fact, studies have shown that movements like occupy have made positive use of social media in promoting and coordinating activistic activities.  People who could not attend a meeting in person, for example, were able to keep up with the meeting via social media updates.  The locations of protests could be shared more easily and amongst more people using social media.  In these ways, peoples' use of their mobile devices actually promoted activism and not slacktivism.  

Overall, I'm not really sure how an argument could be made that slacktivism negatively impacts activism, since it is sort an amorphous idea anyway (where are the hard lines where something is slacktivism but becomes activism? Or is so lame to not even be slacktivism? In other words, without distinct borders, with definitions that multiple scholars agree upon, there are many boundary objects in the gray areas around these labels that muddy this discussion). That said, some of the above literature begins to put some shape to the boundaries on this topic, and it's an interesting thought, that some activity might prevent more activity, but I would hypothesize that the opposite is true, some activity, when rewarded (with likes, or shares, or whatever) would lead to more activity and deeper activity. So I would challenge this premise on many levels. But if more compelling literature can be developed (and prove otherwise), like maybe through Moh's dissertation, I'd be interested to read it.

The medium (repertoire of contention) used for activism may or may not have a direct bearing on the outcomes of an activist cause. Confusing and sometimes equating a medium with the cause is what I believe has led to most of these arguments about the (relative) effectiveness or otherwise of new mobile technologies in activism. I insist that there have always been, and there will always be, people who want to be seen as part of a cause but who will actually contribute relatively little to it, whether they are doing so on a mobile device or in real life (read about the free rider problem for more). The argument then remains, what is little, and what is much, contribution? If all I do is share an activist post, that then ends up being 're-shared' by 200 other people who saw me share it, which ultimately raised awareness about the cause, is my contribution worthwhile or not? What if that singular act of sharing brought the issue to the attention of someone from (for instance) law enforcement (on my timeline), who chose to act and change the situation; would my action be considered "slacktivism"? It would help to avoid labels; successful activism is (in my opinion) the aggregate of several "small" efforts. My mobile device does not necessarily make me lazy; in fact what I see on it might well inform my decision to join a street protest, which is not necessarily a stronger activist 'action'. What if my friends and I sent ten thousand emails each from our respective smart phones from our living room couches to jam the email server of a company polluting the environment, and succeeded in halting the company's operations for some days, within which time the appropriate authorities took action; is that a slacktivism? Let's keep the discussion going.

I'm sure your aware that one of the first major charges of this came from Malcolm Gladwell in his 2010 essay in The New Yorker magazine "Small Change

Why the revolution will not be tweeted." A similar charge, though stressing instead the nefarious use of the Internet rather than any progressive use was made extensively by  Evgeny Morozov in his book 'The Net Delusion'. If you want a more optimistic interpretation the antidote to Gladwell is Carl Shirky especially in his 2008 book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". There is growing data to suggest that the charge is not just wrong but that actually online activists are more likely to engage in activism than people who are less active online. The most comprehensive studies (in the US) are the Pew Civic Engagement studies which adds the caveat that "the “online” and “offline” cohorts of politically engaged Americans are in many cases the same set of individuals engaging with political issues across a range of venues or platforms." 

http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_CivicEngagementintheDigitalAge.pdf