Additionally, Heather Crandall and Carolyn M. Cunningham focus on hashtag activism, where activists use metadata tags to focus on specific issues (ex: #activism). They did not look at one specific protest like the G20 summit, but rather at the benefits and criticisms of hashtag activism as a whole. They discuss that social media is a new media ecology, one where users can connect and share ideas without boundaries. This falls under McLuhan's idea of the world as a global village. By using hashtags, activists are able to bring awareness to social issues. Crandall and Cunningham point out that this is both beautiful and interesting, because it encourages learning, conversations, and community for social justice, and that it is also dark and confusing, because the open environment of the internet also allows hashtags to be used for hate speech and threats of violence. Also, they posit that hashtag activism is pointed and stacked, in that hashtags are often short lived, and the user has to be able to navigate the platform and understand hashtags in order to gain knowledge of the issue. When viewed through media ecology, hashtag activism is changing the way people encounter and engage in social justice.