This week we had to listen to a very empowering Ted Talk about online social change. The talk starts by the women telling us that there was a bombing in Turkey and she tells us that the news reporters wait for the government to tell them what to say. One news reporter was so sick of this treatment that he went to the scene where the bodies were being walked in the coffins and he posted a picture of this on twitter. The picture went viral and then the media had to cover it because of how viral it went. Then a year later in Turkey there was a protest, but the media also tried to cover this up by putting a penguin documentary up. The lady jokes about how she loves penguins and all but that wasn’t the most important news of the day. A person took a picture of the two screens next to each other and that picture also went viral. Spreding the news with our phones and social media has been the way that most people get there information for years, and can you blame them after something like this happens?

Then she says that she watched 4 young college students organize a countrywide citizen journalism network called 140 journos. This network then became the central hub for uncensored news for the country. And then she’s seen 4 young people in Egypt use digital connectivity to organize supplies and logistics for 10 field hospitals. She asked the founder of the one operation when he thought of it and when he started working on it and the time between. The man said 5 minutes. Thats absolutely crazy that he can be that passionate about something to get started on it right away with no hesitation.

She then brought up the very interesting fact that back in the day people didn’t have twitter, instagram, Facebook to spread the word about what was happening and what to protest. So what did they do? Ill tell you, they had to mimeograph 52,000 leaflets by sneaking into a university duplicating room. They stayed up all night working on the civil rights movement leaflets and then they had to distribute all of them by hand! Thats crazy to me. Now a days people just send out a tweet saying this kind of stuff and it goes viral and then that’s how you get the big news. People really had to grind It out bak then.

Then she says that today we go to fast about spreading the news and that we have to go slower and be more tedious about our approach. She says back then, working slowly and collectively made them be able to think together and more collectively as well. I personally think that we really struggle with this kind of thing today. Its always an argument. We should be able to consider everyones opinion but still be united and still think as one. We should be able to make the hard decisions together and create concuss among ourselves.

Check out this weekly news article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/sports/football/nfl-postpones-titans-coronavirus-patriots.html