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Thursday, May 8, 2014

Class Recap

Online Communication and Citizen Participation

As a cognitive science student from California, taking classes at a foreign university in unfamiliar departments posed a lot of uncertainty for me. I am currently spending a semester away from UC Berkeley to study abroad in Madrid, Spain and attend Carlos III in Getafe. Ultimately, I decided to take three classes: Media Psychology, Spanish Art History, and Online Communication and Citizen Participation because I was drawn to the course material and felt these classes would complement my study of the human mind. 





My new home: Carlos III 

I was particularly fond of my time in the last of these classes, a course offered primarily to first year bilingual journalism students. Initially I was very drawn to this course because of my fascination with communication technology and more than anything, how it influences the “human experience”. Specifically, I am very interested in exploring how technology and the web have influenced the way people gain access to information and interact with one another.

This class approached both of these topics with the angle of how technology can be used to advance human rights and better the world, politically and socially. I appreciated that we weren’t just studying the material to understand how the web is currently used, but also with extra attention to how it can and should be used. There was just the right amount of political and cultural content to make the class highly meaningful without overwhelming students with polemic and complicated information. All in all, the course was extremely engaging and provided an introduction to many areas of a general topic, including examples that were powerful and informative.

My favorite topic in the class was about the way storytelling can be used as an effective means of reaching people, and the power a good story has. I felt it was good that an emphasis was also placed on the importance of multimedia executions of these stories, and on the integration of data visualization for supporting a story. Though I have limited knowledge regarding the field journalism, I do think the industry is headed that direction and that is was valuable for us to learn about them and practice including them in our work. 

This video describes the importance of storytelling today, and I felt like it was an interesting compliment to what we learned in class. 



And interestingly, I am currently interning at Saffron Brand Consultants, a brand strategy consultancy. We just published this article about the importance of storytelling for building strong brands. Clearly word is catching on!

I was extremely impressed with our professor Leila Nachawati Rego. Not only was her level of both English and Spanish impeccable—clearly an asset within her field. I felt the way she approached the material, interacted with her students, and organized the class material to be very effective and interesting. For example, we discussed government surveillance quite a lot and what is occurring in many countries today. In studying this topic, the class could have easily become distracted in discussing the politics of each country, and perhaps criticizing the way governments have dealt with surveillance. However, I felt Professor Nachawati Rego directed the class’ attention to the means by which journalists and activists are advocating their beliefs. Professor Nachawati Rego was highly objective in her political and social commentary and kept the class focused on the topics central to journalism, demonstrating a command over the students and material that I seldom encounter with professors.

As a non-Spanish student, I appreciated the emphasis put on meeting students from alternative backgrounds and sharing details and examples that came from our home countries. It was a pleasure getting to meet students from Australia, Venezuela, Sweden, Germany, South Korea and different cities across Spain. I was impressed with the level of camaraderie among the Spanish students, and realized it must be due, in part, to the Spanish system where students of the same major take the majority of their classes together. This is highly different from the experience I have had at UC Berkeley, where I have a massive amount of freedom regarding which classes I take and when.


Though this class does not have a direct relationship to my major because it doesn’t analyze the way the human mind works, it was interesting for me to consider how media reflect the human psyche and our interests as people. Not to mention the fact that I have worked a bit in digital advertising and marketing strategy, all of which investigate how people engage with digital media.

I am very glad I chose to take this class. My peers all seemed to enjoy it a lot, there was a good classroom dynamic, the topics were very modern and interdisciplinary.


Free expression is being recognized as someone who matters and someone whose voice deserves to be heard.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Jacob´s Story: The boy of Kony 2012

Many of us are familiar with the viral campaign “Kony 2012” — and if not, you have probably at least seen a cover photo or two on Facebook that looks something like this:

Kony 2012 was a campaign designed by the NGO Invisible Children that aimed to make the LRA´s (Lord Resistance Army´s) chief leader famous in order to garner citizen concern and awareness around remedying the situation of child slavery in Uganda. Kony 2012 advocated that if people care about the issue, then politicians, particularly those in the United States, will spend their time and resources to address these problems. Thus, Kony 2012 primary objective was to spread the word and make people care about the turmoil in Uganda and the Invisible Children.
The video Kony 2012 became the most viral video in the history of the Internet; it received 100 million views within the first 6 days of its release. So massive was its spread across social media that shortly after the release, Invisible Children became the most popular NGO on Facebook. The staggering fact about this popularity: the video is 30 minutes long! How is it that so many people invested such time watching a video that was being shared around the Internet? Most people hardly sit through a three-minute Youtube video of a cat doing something goofy and cute.

I argue that the key to the success of this campaign is Jacob´s story juxtaposed and integrated with Gavin´s. For amidst all of the strategies that this video outlines for Kony´s capture and flashy messaging which champions a call to action from all Internet users, is woven in a startling and compelling story—the story of Jacob, a Ugandan boy who´s brother is kidnapped to become a child soldier. Jason Russell, the director of the Kony 2012 video met Jacob while in Uganda and has sought to help him ever since. In the Kony 2012 video, Jason tells us his own story and the story of his son Gavin, and we see with startling clarity the differences in their lives. Gavin is born into a safe home, where he is allowed to attend school and pursue fun and learning experiences as any child ideally would. In comparison, we learn of Jacob, who lives everyday in fear of capture and has lost family since a young age to the terrors of civil war and slavery. The friendship between the Russell family and Jacob is moving and a pointed reminder that while some parts of the world do not have the same privilege to safety as the Russell´s do.


For those of you who missed it, let´s revisit Jacob´s story now and see how it becomes tied to Gavin and Jason´s. For even taken out of the context of the Kony 2012 video, Jacob´s story lets us understand the situation in Uganda today and realize the terror it creates in the lives of Ugandan families. Ultimately, combined with Jason Russell´s story of how he met Jacob and why he wants to help, a powerful message of destruction and possibility is finally generated.  


Jason Russell prefaces Jacob´s introduction by sharing this footage of his own son´s birth:
“Every single person in the world started this way. He didn´t choose where or when he was born. But because he´s here, he matters.”



We learn that Gavin likes making sand angels, and acting and directing in films like his father. Gavin points to a photo on the refrigerator of Jacob and comments that this is their friend Jacob from Africa.
The film backtracks to 2003, where we are virtually dropped into a map of Africa, in Uganda near Gala to meet Jacob – who was then a schoolboy fighting for his life.


In this image, we see Jason and Jacob meeting for the first time. We learn that Jacob is a schoolboy who saw his brother murdered by the LRA for attempting to escape.


“We come here to save our lives.” These young boys and girls seek refuge within an urban Ugandan city. Living with their parents at home is too great of a risk because the rural setting allows for easy capture by the LRA. These children sleep like sardines in these somewhat dilapidated buildings so that they may live another day free from slavery. Jason comments that if this were to happen one day in the United States, it would run on the cover of Newsweek, but these children and their battle for survival remain invisible to the world.



In school, Jacob always wanted to be a lawyer. But his fear of capture and lack of financial means make him feel as if he has bleak chances in succeeding this dream.


In this disturbing and moving scene, young Jacob speaks with Jason about his brother’s murder. He witnessed as the LRA slit his brothers neck; and this is a moment he has carried with him ever since. Jacob goes as far as to say that he often wishes he were dead so he could be with his brother and avoid the torment that is fearing every day and a potential kidnapping.



At this moment, Jason Russell vows to stop the LRA so that what happened to Jacob's brother does not happen to any more children.





Jason explains to Gavin a bit about the situation, and this moment really highlights the differences in their lives. “I couldn´t explain to Gavin the details of what Joseph Kony really does because the truth is kony abducts kids just like Gavin. For 26 years , Kony has been kidnapping children into his rebel group the LRA. Turning girls into sex slaves and the boys into child soldiers. He makes them mutilate people´s faces and he forces them to kill their own parents. And this is not just a few children. It´s been over 30,000 of them.”



Jacob was one of these children.

Jacob goes on to aid Invisible Children and travel to the United States to tell his story and spread word about the atrocities committed by the LRA. He is currently pursuing his dream of becoming a lawyer, and given that the LRA has traveled toward the Congo, Uganda is peaceful once more. However, the same is occurring with children now outside of Uganda and their stories must continue to be made visible in order to make things right.

To watch the complete video and learn the details of how Invisible Children strategized to help Kony and bring down Kony and the LRA at large, click here.