This week, we’re moving from thinking of how we interact with and use traditional media sources to how social media has become one of the main sites for young activists to share their voices. This does not negate the power of traditional civic genres like speeches and op-eds (which we’ll tackle in a couple weeks); it just places them in a different context. For today’s asynchronous work, I have two find-and-describe exercises I’d like you to perform to connect our discussions of speech writing and social media campaigns:
- Find a Recent Speech That Moves You
- Social media is full of videos of speeches, both short and long, given to large and small audiences. Scroll through your feeds, do a few searches, and find one that stands out to you. Make sure the speech is engaging with a civic issue, and that it’s been given sometime within the past ten years. (The more recent, the better.)
- After you’ve watched the speech in its entirety, in a document in your Google Drive folder, analyze the speech. (Provide a link to the speech as well.) What made it stand out to you? What made it effective? How did the speaker grab your attention from the start? Explain your answers.
- Consider your local context. If you were the speaker’s speech writer and had to help them adjust the speech to be given in your local community, what would need to change? Why?
- Find an Effective Social Media Campaign
- Continuing our social media hunt, this exercise asks you to consider where you’ve seen activists using social media for civic engagement purposes. We’ll be looking at examples of this in class together that I’ve found, but I’d like to see what you come up with.
- Think back to when you’ve seen civic influencers you may follow posting on social media, or when you’ve seen traditional influencers posting about civic topics over a period of time. Go to the string of posts that stand out in your memory. If you can’t think of anything, give your feeds another scroll and see what you come up with – I guarantee there will be something out there if you look hard enough. 🙂
- Once you’ve settled on a group of posts (a campaign) to work with, consider what makes up the campaign. What components are included – links to more info, stats, surveys, polls, petitions, registration links, mailing list links, shocking images, celebrities, a call to action, donation requests, other elements? Are those spread out over several posts, or included all at once? Does the person or organization who posted the campaign have accounts across different social media platforms? If so, how does the campaign change for each platform? (Or does it? And do you think that’s effective?)
- If you were running this campaign, what might you do differently? How would you improve on what has already been posted?
We’ll discuss your responses to these in class on Thursday. Enjoy your snow day, everyone! 🙂
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