Advocacy in the age of Wi-Fi

When the internet first arrived in the mid-1990s, it screeched. Literally.

It screamed its way into our homes through the telephone lines, a metallic cry that sounded like the future forcing its way through. We waited through the static, convinced that life was about to get easier. People said it would save us time, let us work from home and give us more hours with our families.

No one mentioned that it would also move into our bedrooms, our pockets and our dreams. No one could have imagined that it would change how we fight, how we march, how we plead for justice. That the fight for justice itself would become a digital labyrinth where truth moves slowly and attention moves fast.

Back then, when a heroine from a popular early-2000s television show was dumped with nothing but a handwritten note, it became a cultural tragedy. There was nothing noble about writing your cowardice on a Post-it. A few years later, a company fired hundreds by email and it made national news. Today, we “quietly quit” through apps without blinking, edit our grief into reels, add the music the app suggests and call it closure.

The future did arrive, just not the one we imagined.

Somewhere along the way, the glass between us became the new confessional. The clunky computer gave way to a glowing relic that fit in our palms. We campaign, testify and pray to the algorithm. Our devices hum beside us at night, loyal and hungry. I once kept rosary beads on my nightstand. Now, it’s a charger that keeps vigil.

The internet promised connection, but delivered spectacle. We have confused visibility with impact. Real advocacy, the kind that changes laws and saves lives, still happens in rooms without Wi-Fi, where no one is filming and no one is trending.

From the shy dial-up years to today’s infinite scroll, the internet has shed its politeness and grown teeth. It feeds on boredom, fear and grief until everyone becomes a philosopher, a broadcaster, an activist. We hashtag suffering and perform compassion in high resolution.

Advocacy without sweat.

But real advocacy, the kind that matters, doesn’t upload well. It happens in waiting rooms and council chambers, in the slow rooms of bureaucracy where applause is replaced by silence. Bureaucracy doesn’t respond to hashtags. It answers to persistence, signatures and a certain kind of madness that keeps you writing letters when everyone else has logged off.

I know because I live it. Early last year, I was struck by a car while crossing the street. What followed was not a moment. It was a transformation.

I have spent the months since rebuilding body and faith, and now I advocate for road safety, for the crossing guards who stand between danger and our children, for the strangers whose lives are measured in seconds of driver impatience. Most of my work happens off camera, very slowly. No filters. No metrics. Only persistence, heavy as wet rope, pulled again and again through the same hands.

You send an email and wait. You follow up. You attend meeting after meeting. Sometimes you wonder if anyone is listening. The internet can amplify voices, but it cannot replace the courage of showing up.

Online spaces still matter. They raise awareness, connect strangers across continents and spark the first small fires of collective action. But those sparks fade unless someone carries the torch.

Digital advocacy may open the door, but real change still requires feet that cross thresholds, hands that hold signs, voices that don’t fade when the battery dies. When the Wi-Fi cuts out, what remains is the work, the letters, the meetings, the conversations and the remembering of what advocacy was meant to be: not a performance, but a promise.

The greater challenge now is truth. Misinformation breeds like fruit flies, clever and sweetly rotten. Facts crawl while lies sprint. Those of us working for change in the physical world find ourselves competing not only with apathy, but with distortion. Videos are edited to deceive. Images are generated from nothing but code and conviction. Artificial intelligence now sits in the crowd, speaking in familiar tones, mimicking empathy, reshaping reality one pixel at a time. It flatters us into believing it understands. For those who wish to deceive, it has become the perfect accomplice.

Advocacy today means learning to fight on two fronts: one against injustice, the other against the fog of misinformation that keeps people from seeing it.

I don’t know what will break the spell, or how we move from reaction to real advocacy. Maybe we only awaken when something touches us directly. Maybe compassion has to hurt before it becomes useful. But if being a voice for change begins with a post on your feed, it cannot end there. It doesn’t grow there either.

Change still needs hands, not hashtags.

Bella Luna Zuniga is a Winnipeg writer.