Commons Campaign Portfolio: What It Really Takes

Commons Campaigns

Mikayla Pate

Preston Phillips

Alex Feekin

Nicole Ochal

The problem (exigence) that we have found is present both within the city of Lincoln, as well as on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. There is a lack of knowledge regarding the effects and consequences of alcohol.  The presence of drunk driving is a problem that needs to be addressed. We have found this to be a huge problem because it puts so many people in danger, especially when there are safer alternatives available to students. We  attempted to address the student population at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Problems did arise during our project, although we didn’t really face a population of students who were unwilling to participate in any surveys regarding this topic. We did have a problem of actually getting the student population to participate in our campaign. It was hard to “break through the clutter.” By creating an online survey we were able to allow students to keep a sense of anonymity, since in-person surveys may create a judgemental atmosphere. We did in fact face students who are unwilling to visit our facebook page and “Like” it. We also faced problems of students not responding to the cups, they may have not noticed them or they may have gotten thrown away by staff prior to being exposed to students. Our proposal had the opportunity to help  put an end to drunk driving by the students of University of Nebraska-Lincoln and inform them of the consequences of alcohol.

Drunk driving is an awful practice that too many of our Nebraska residents participate in. This greatly affects our students, and we aim to stop and prevent this practice by UNL students. In 2003, the state of Nebraska had over 9,000 arrests that involved driving while intoxicated. There were over 31,000 vehicle crashes that involved an intoxicated driver. This resulted in over 200 deaths. This is exactly why we needed to address the topic of consumption of alcohol by students on our campus. We tried to create an inventive/creative approach to this problem, we needed to have a good structure, we needed to draw from stylistic elements, make our project memorable, and figure out the best medium of delivery. Our approach took a common product associated with alcohol and used it to send an educational and informational message that was seen immediately and that had the opportunity to continue to have an effect through social media.   Our proposal was unique and unfortunately did not get us the results we are looking for. We had an organizational process that  made it so the people that took the survey had full privacy, with a judgment free environment. Our goal was to learn what problems regarding alcohol consumption existed and we addressed them with either an alternative or educational facts. We utilized something that students are actually interested in, something that the recognized and that they associated with the topic at hand.  We didn’t start with a specific goal, we planned to examine our survey results and pick the most pressing problem(s) to address. The style we used allowed us to directly reach out to the student population. Our structure was very tailored, as we had a set plan that contained a survey, compiling results, analyzing the situation and creating a way to address the specific problems regarding alcohol use.  The only way that we could make this campaign memorable, was if we carefully directed it to students on a personal level, and make them think about how their actions affect others. Our project was memorable because we are focused on an issue that greatly affects the student population; our project did have ability to make a real difference on this campus, but unfortunately didn’t grow to the scale that we had hoped due to a variety of reasons. We utilized the following types of media: social media, and “guerilla” advertising.  

Our survey ran for 2 weeks and got 75 responses.  We had a total of 21 questions which allowed for us to get a variety of data about alcohol consumption by UNL students. Our survey titled “Drinking at UNL” alerted us to a variety of problems related to drinking on the UNL campus. 89.6% of respondents stated that they do drink alcohol. Over 70% of respondents claimed that they were under the age of 21. Over 60% of respondents stated that they drink 1-3 times per week. The majority of alcohol consumption takes place at parties: 72.4% of respondents stated that the main place that they consume alcohol is at a party. 77% percent of respondents stated that they try to have a designated driver prior to drinking. 15% of respondents stated that they plan on driving after drinking alcohol. Over 40% stated that they do not generally plan a ride home prior to drinking. 59% stated that they have previously  driven after consuming alcoholic beverages. 64% of respondents claimed that they did not ever feel comfortable driving after drinking. 14% claimed that they felt safe driving a short distance of under one mile after drinking. 10% claimed they felt safe driving up to five miles. Nearly 2% claimed they felt safe driving 5-10 miles. Nearly 9% claimed that they felt safe driving over 10 miles after drinking. 12.5% of respondents claimed that they have driving after drinking in the last week. 7% claimed that they have driven after drinking in the last month. On average, students believe it takes between 2-5 drinks per hour until they believe that they are “drunk” (or unable to drive).44% of respondents believe that it takes at least 2-3 drinks per hour will make you intoxicated. 38.5% believe it takes at least 3-5 drinks per hour to become intoxicated. Respondents claimed that over 60% did not feel safe driving after 1-6 drinks. Over 23% claimed that they never felt “unsafe” driving, even after more than 9 drinks. After drinking, over 11% claimed that they felt safe driving immediately after consuming alcohol. 25% claimed that they felt safe driving after waiting 1 hour after drinking. 64% claimed they felt safe after waiting 2 or more hours after drinking. The majority of respondents claimed that they felt that “feeling the alcohol” “not being able to walk straight” “slurred speech” and “vomiting” were signs of being “drunk”. UNL offers an emergency ride program known as 475-RIDE. Over 75% of students do not know about this program. Students have stated that they get the majority of their information about the programs that UNL has from other students, social media and fliers/posters.

With that information we created 4 cup designs that would inform and educate students on the topics that they were least informed about. The first cup design was simply “www.facebook.com/whatitreallytakes”. This was to simply direct students to our page out of curiosity, in hopes that they would “like” our page and then learn about alcohol and it’s effects and consequences through our Facebook page.  The second cup had “What can happen with a DUI?” written in large letters. surrounding that text a variety of consequences were written on the cup. We included the lesser known results of a DUI. We included that it can stay on background checks, prevent you from gaining employment, result in higher insurance rates, result in the loss of a drivers license for years, result in mandatory alcohol education classes.The third cup focused on transportation after drinking. This was to help students realize that driving under the influence does have real consequences. Most students were unaware of what really happened when you got a DUI. The main text read “Drinking and driving isn’t the only option.” Around that text, there were a variety of ways that one can get home if too intoxicated to drive. Uber,Lyft, taxis, friends,family and 475-Ride were all listed modes of transportation. The goal of this cup was to offer students an alternative to driving drunk.  The last set of cup focused on how many drinks it takes to become legally intoxicated. This cups main text read “It only takes 3-4 drinks per hour to become legally intoxicated.” It also had the servings of alcohol, 1 drink= 12oz Beer, 5oz Wine, or 1.5oz liquor. This cup was intended to allow students to really learn and become educated about how much alcohol it really takes to become drunk or become legally intoxicated. From our survey results, we learned that students are very uneducated about the signs of being intoxicated and how many drinks it really takes. Each cup also had the facebook page listed it on it as well. There were over 250 cups that have been placed throughout the student union and library.

The Facebook page had more in depth information on alcohol consumption. The posts included a chart that assisted people with finding out approximately how many drinks it would take for them to be legally intoxicated. Additional information regarding DUI’s and the 475-RIDE program were also available. There was a new post at least every other day, the posts were relevant, and interesting. Posts included pictures, charts and links. We chose to create a campaign that allowed to reach people on multiple levels. With Facebook we were hoping that we would be able to capture students attention just once, to get them to “Like” our page. Once they “liked” our page, we would be able to communicate to them. With social media, we are able to open up 2 way communication. We aren’t just handing things out or sending out information, we are giving students a chance to have an actual conversation, and a place where they can ask questions, participate in discussion and learn about alcohol consumption.

If we were to change something about this project, we would have gotten permission from the ASUN to create and run an entire comprehensive advertising campaign about the 475-Ride program. This was our original plan, but we were unable to obtain permission to do so. Something  that could have improved the campaign is the addition of cups. We were unable to get our donation request for additional cups approved, we were able to purchase 250 cups that we placed around campus. With more cups we would have been able to educate more students and have cups in a wider variety of locations on campus, including East campus and dorms. We learned that it is a lot harder to “Break through the clutter” and actually reach the audience. We learned that there has been so many different programs that focus on safe driving yet there are still a high number of individuals that drive intoxicated.

http://www.transportation.nebraska.gov/nohs/areas/al1enf.html#stats

UNLConnect Portfolio

Nick Gilbert, Meghan McGuigan-Sporkin, Brandon Knoop

COMM 250 Commons Campaign Portfolio

UNLConnect

            As students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we have noticed that many of our classmates do not talk to one another before class and many people sit alone in the dining halls. In our project, titled UNLConnect, we tried to change this by using a variety of methods to encourage interaction between students in an effort to improve the sense of community here on campus. In this project portfolio, we will explain the rhetorical situation, analyze and explain our intervention, and provide a reflection on how we could have improved our campaign.

The rhetorical exigence for our project was that we felt a lessened sense of community in UNL as we had noticed that in each of our classes most people choose not interact with each other and instead are on their phones all the time. Additionally there were a lot of people who sit alone in the dining halls while eating, and we had noticed that no one makes an effort to sit by them or invite them to join. Our rhetorical audience was the student community of UNL because our goal was for UNL to have a more united student population on campus. In our survey, many people commented how most people on campus are good people but don’t socialize with new people. We wanted to address that.

Some of the constraints we considered for our project were that some people will be too stuck in their ways to even attempt interacting with their peers and other people will be too shy to consider talking to a complete stranger. Indeed on our survey, many participants blamed a fear of rejection for not engaging with their classmates. Other people, however, gave the reason that they simply had no desire to interact with classmates. The opportunities for our project to succeed were that a lot of people on our campus are open-minded and social and would be up for the challenge of interacting with their peers especially if one of the outcomes is that they would make new friends. Our goal for this project was to make UNL a more unified campus and get the student body as a whole to engage with one another more rather than relying on strictly their phones and social media for their socialization.

            In terms of invention, our project required us to find the appropriate argument to convince our audience of college students to improve the community through being more social before class and in the dining halls. We decided that the best combination of pathos, ethos, and logos for our situation entailed briefly describing how our project benefits our audience which constituted appeals to logos and pathos, and then telling them honestly why we are doing it and visibly participating in it ourselves which constituted appeals to ethos. In terms of arrangement, when we spoke to our classmates we first described what we were doing and what we wanted them to do, then how it benefited them, and finally why we were doing this project. In terms of memory, we had to know the details of our project and present our campaign in a memorable way. There was always more information available on our UNLConnect Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr pages. Delivery and style were integral to our success because if we were to be successful we needed people to remember our project and then participate. Therefore we wanted to exhibit the traits associated with good speakers including clear, loud, and dynamic voice and maintaining eye contact. Our style had to be common so that we connected with our audience, but professional so that our audience respected our campaign and wanted to participate.

            We created a Facebook page which we all shared with our friends and groups. In total, it got 29 likes. However, our posts on the Facebook page had an average of 80 viewers. So even if we didn’t have that many likes on Facebook people still looked at our page. Our Twitter account garnered 141 followers. Our tweets averaged about one favorite. As a group shared this Twitter account with their friends who go to college here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Nick was in charge of the Twitter account, Brandon was in charge of the Facebook page.

            For our Commons Campaign Project we integrated several different forms of social media cites into reaching out to the community of UNL. Several forms of social media that we utilized included having a Tumblr page as well as using the interactive survey website Survey Monkey. Meghan was in charge of the Tumblr page.

            We were able to elicit a very good number of people who responded to our Survey Monkey survey; over 50 people completed the full survey and 42 people added additional comments at the end of the survey talking about their experiences with interacting with strangers at college. We were able to promote our survey to get our peers to take it, reaching out in several different ways. We used the mass email system on Blackboard to send the survey to people from this class as well as our other classes. We each made an announcement to each of our classes and the groups that we are active in on campus.  Also everyone in the group was able to talk about the project with their friends and acquaintances on campus. We utilized the social media cites that we set up for our Commons Campaign in order to promote our survey to even more people. We posted a link to the survey on the Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr pages.

            Unlike the social media sites that were made, the Tumbler page had the least amount of success with promoting our Commons Campaign. Additionally unlike Facebook where you can see how many people view the groups post, and twitter where you get retweeting notifications-Tumblr proved to be harder to attract people to reblog the post’s about the project. A partial explanation for this is because much more people use Facebook/Twitter than do Tumblr.  Tumblr users also don’t use their real names and the site is less focused on real life social networks. Also most re-blogged pictures or articles on Tumblr usually contain some sort of aspirational quality that you would expect to see on Pinterest. Tumblr is not really conducive for getting a large audience interested in a class project. The format of Tumblr is more conducive to the aspirational blogging style that similar sites such as Pinterest are based on.

            Most of our project went relatively well. Considering the difficulty in producing a viral campaign, we got a good number of responses. We had many comments from our peers which said they really liked our project and our goals. We spent quite a bit of time and effort on our project. Additionally, our group worked well together, despite the difficulty in finding times to meet.

            As a group there is always something that we could in improve on. As a group we thought we could have improved our project’s success by putting up fliers, table tents, and posters around campus. We also could have set up a display outside the Student Union and talk to people passing by and distribute fliers. If we had more funds, we even could have made t-shirts with our logo and goal and distributed them on campus. We also should have planned more content to post on Facebook and Twitter. One last way to improve our project would have been to use an actual, personal website instead of Tumblr. That way we could customize it more and provide an online space for people on campus to interact with one another.

Commons Campaign Portfolio - #LookUp

Commons Campaign Project 2015

Communications 250

Professor Damien Pfister

Evan Wooten, Leland Chow & Stefan Haynes

For our proposal for this project, we had decided on running both a Facebook and Twitter hashtag campaign called #LookUp. #LookUp was a campaign of asking people to spend less time on their technological devices while walking, and just look up, see and maybe communicate more with other people. The exigence of the campaign was the decrease in face-to-face human interaction nowadays, and an increase in dependence on technological devices. This could affect daily life interactions, and potentially relationships with other people. Because of this, there was a need to encourage people to interact more with other people face-to-face and being less dependent on technology.

The audience was actually intended for everyone and anyone in Lincoln, Nebraska, ranging from students, faculty, staffs, to even the public. We believed we should include everyone in Lincoln, Nebraska because it is a campaign for all. However, we did believe that there were constraints facing response to this campaign. One of them was that the people might not be paying attention to the #LookUp account and page in Twitter and Facebook respectively. Another constraint was be the lack of participation from the audience as the audience might think that it was too challenging for them to do. Besides, another constraint was that the people might be apathetic towards the challenges, as the people in the modern society were vulnerable to caring less. Yet another constraint was that the audience might feel that it is too awkward for them to participate in the challenge, as they might be too shy or it might be outside of their comfort zone.

However, there were opportunities facing response to the campaign as well. The people could pick and choose the challenges they think were feasible to do, as the challenges were not timed definitely. Moreover, people who participate in the campaign could have a chance of meeting new people and making friends with them, forging a new friendship. Another opportunity was that the people would also be more aware of surroundings, and pay more attention to the beauty of the nature.

We understood that there might be other ways that encourage people to not be too dependent on technological devices, such as through an advertisement or a video, but we believed our campaign was a fitting response because it challenged our audience to not be on their technological devices too much, and it also could encourage more interaction among our audience. We hoped that this campaign did not only reach Lincoln, Nebraska, nor only Nebraska, but all around the world, but fundamentally, we just hoped that people would not be on their phones all the time.

When dealing with this project, we believed we have great ways to address the invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery of this project. Our ideas and ways of following through on this project were interesting and unique. To start, we needed to find inventive ways to gather data and address the problem we are facing; in this case we would be counting how many people we see on a given day looking at their phones while walking to class. This would be our data we use for our campaign. Because we recognized that phones, iPads, and other electronic devices were the issue we are facing, we were, ironically, using them to spread our message. The people that were viewing our tweets, posts, and posters would be made more aware of their uses of technology while performing other tasks. This encompassed our style and delivery. Stylistically, we were taking a modern approach and trying to show others how frequently they were on their phones by using Twitter and Facebook. We were showing them how often they used their phones by how often we tweeted and were trying to instruct and move them to not use their phones and devices as much. This tied in with our delivery because we were fighting fire with fire. Our delivery was ironic and eye opening. We were not only using social media, though; we were also going to be placing posters all over campus with our movement and hiding Post-It notes around campus with just “#LookUp” written on them. This would give an air of anonymity and made people feel as though this was an underground movement, it added mystery to the campaign. We were building or arranging our campaign in a way that will lead people to our social media accounts. The posters and post-it notes would be the first things people see, after reading the hashtag and tag-line of our movement they would hopefully look this hashtag up, they would then see what our movement was about and partake in our challenges. Fortunately, our ideas of people being too reliant on technology were not outlandish. Many others felt this same way which would make it easier to spread our message. People would find our post-it notes in random places, see our posters, and enjoy the challenges. Maybe the people who participate would continue the challenges and turn them into a lifestyle. If a challenge was only checking Instagram once a day, there would be others who got into that habit and it stayed with them. This was what made our project memorable. We had so many moving pieces and they were able to be shared and talked about. Our challenges could be turned into habits and our advertising was guerilla in some circumstances. This in itself made our project memorable, unique, and something others would want to be a part of.

The brass tacks of the execution of our project was almost a mirror image of what we had envisioned in our portfolio. The first step was brainstorming as many “challenges” for our project as possible. We organized these challenges into two categories: Daily and Weekly. In all, we came up with about twenty, which proved more than enough for our planned eight challenges. After this, Evan came up with a memorable and immediately recognizable graphic for the campaign which absolutely nailed it on the semiotic front and this graphic quickly became the figurehead for our entire movement.  Just as we had proposed, we printed up dozens of posters and post-it with only this mysterious graphic and hashtag and posted them in every legitimate and, possibly, some-less-than-legitimate locations we could think of around the campus as well as a few locations at businesses in the city to harvest potential individuals from our public. Soon after we set up the posters and post-it notes, it was time to man our social media outlets! Evan took the reins behind the Twitter outlet of our project and Leland, with some help from Stefan, manned our Facebook page. In addition to shelling out of pocket for the posters, Evan even paid a considerable sum of his own money to get our Facebook page seen by as many people as possible!

At this point, things were really looking up for #lookup, and with puns that great how could we not succeed?

The first thing we noticed was the dimorphism of our parlance, our eloquence based on our social media platform. On Twitter, Evan realized that a more informal method of communication would be most effective; because of the 140 character limit as well as the fast-paced nature of Twitter, he opted to keep his tweets curt and kitschy, and not quite as concerned with grammatical perfection. However, on Facebook, Leland and Stefan noted that the lack of character limit and the more formal parameters of the interface necessitated both grammatical correctness and a slightly more detached way of interacting with our “Likers.” Examples of both are attached.

Another factor that we quickly picked up on was the importance of Kairos and Decorum; we had to choose a perfect time to post the challenges, be they in the morning, when our public awakens or in the afternoon, after they’ve already kickstarted their day as well as select the appropriate challenge for both the medium (Twitter or Facebook) as well as when in the timeline of our project we’re posting things (we had a few strange challenges, and we opted to put those only near the end of our campaign so as not to frighten off our public early on). In summation, our process for selecting challenges went as follows:

1. Leland, Evan and Stefan suggest challenges on Google Docs.
2. Leland picks challenges to be posted for the day/week and suggests the challenge to be posted in Facebook Messenger.
3. Leland and Evan post challenges on Facebook and Twitter respectively.

And our process for posting those challenges on Facebook went as follows:

1. Write down challenge.
2. Schedule post to be posted in the noon/afternoon (10am to 12pm)
3. Pin the post to top of page.
4. Leland shares and likes status.

So you’d think with such a well-organized campaign and rigorous and carefully curated schedule our movement would be an unqualified success, right? Sadly, as much as we appreciate the confidence, on that you’d be horribly mistaken… Our project really didn’t come together nearly as successfully as any of us had hoped.

There are a number of factors we believe contributed to our, more or less, failure, some being factors we may have been able to control and many others being well out of our hands. One of the first issues we recognized is that, believe it or not, we appear to already be reaching the end of the Clicktivism Renaissance; people in our age group are becoming far less cavalier about what they ‘like’ on Social Media. In addition to that, Stefan in particular noted that almost all of his closest friends have either completely deactivated their Twitter and Facebook accounts or only use them extremely rarely for highly formal activities. It’s a sad fact but a fact nonetheless; our project was just simply not able to go viral, with re-tweets almost exclusively from Evan and statuses from exclusively Leland and Stefan, there just wasn’t enough gas in our go-karts to cross the finish line. Our meme of #lookup just simply wasn’t meme-orable enough, despite being armed with such scintillating puns like that. Still, it’s quite difficult to quantify just how much of our campaign failed because of what we lacked and how much of it was merely our public’s reticence to deviate from their norm, from what they’re comfortable with. While our #LookUp campaign may be down for now, if people continue to move away from social media and the internet in general, who knows? Maybe people really will start to look up.

Screenshots and other pictures can be found in this link.

The Ethicality of Anonymous

Paige Osborne

The Ethicality of Anonymous

As I sit down to type this, I can’t help but think of my technological footprint. There’s a cringe worthy Myspace page I made when I was 13 that I’d be embarrassed to find. My internet search history reads something like an intense attention disorder with insomnia and it would span from the interesting to, how did you even think of that? But despite my mostly innocent treks into internetdom, I get a little nervous about Anonymous. Frankly, I think that their presence is a necessary one, but there is something about the organization that does inspire a trickle of fear. Mostly because I understand that it isn’t just the worthy campaigns they go after.

            As uncomfortable as government officials are about Anonymous’s hacking, I’m sure they are also relieved that the full force of the organization isn’t leveled at their own personal internet identity. As evidenced by this Washington Times article, Anonymous confirmed responsibility for redirecting a French jihadi website to reroute to a search engine, (Chasmar). While jihads are a more than worthy target, I have to wonder how they have picked some of their other victims. The hacking that Anonymous has done to find paedophiles and users sharing child pornography has almost literally put these users on a silver plate for the F.B.I. and Interpol. But these aren’t the groups that make Anonymous’s online policing an ethical dilemma. It’s some of the Internet’s most hated individuals.

Sarah Palin and Valhalla, a.k.a. Hal Turner are a couple of the cases where I see that their agenda hasn’t been completely ethical. First, Sarah Palin’s email was hacked by Anonymous so they could, “derail her campaign,” (Johnson). I agree that public figures adhere to a kind of scrutiny that isn’t experienced by the rest of the public. But I think that if you’re going to represent Anonymous and hack by guessing the right password, then you don’t have the same kind of intentions that would accompany finding child predators and taking down the Westboro Baptist Church’s Twitter account.

Another unpopular figure, Hal Turner, was a target of Anonymous. While we watched the documentary in class that unfolded this case, I have to argue that the case against him wasn’t totally rooted in doing the moral thing. Hal Turner is a pretty despicable person, and I agree that although he hadn’t broken the law, it takes someone morally bankrupt to spew the hate that he did on his radio show. But I just don't think that disliking someone is grounds for waging war. And Anonymous has a particular scorched earth approach to war that makes it a pretty formidable opponent. Furthermore, in all the hacking that Anonymous has done to Mr. Turner, I don’t think they expected to find that he was a F.B.I. informant. So while all his ranting and raving kind of mobilizes his listeners, he was able to keep an eye on them in a way that the F.B. I. wasn’t. So they basically went after someone who was actually doing something good.

Since these campaigns, I think that Anonymous has evolved as an organization. Instead of attacking personal grudges, I think there is a lot more focus of worthy campaigns, but I think that Anonymous will always be in danger of retrograding if they don’t have the right leadership. But the worst thing for Anonymous would be for their members to be bored. As long as there’s something worth disrupting, I think they’ll be okay.

Works Cited

Chasmar, Jessica. "Anonymous Hacks Terror Website in Retaliation for Charlie Hebdo Attack." Washington Times. The Washington Times, 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2015.

Johnson, Bobbie. "Sarah Palin vs the Hacker." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 27 May 2010. Web. 22 Apr. 2015.

When honesty and sincerity are at odds with the truth.

From the instant he stepped into our classroom to the moment I ducked out about half an hour into the Q&A session after his powerful film had wrapped up, Ian Thomas Ash never struck me as anything less than sincere. Here is a person who has strong personal convictions and a drive to be as much of a force for good in this world as he can. Selfless is a word bandied about all too carelessly today but I honestly think there is no better adjective to describe him. He has the intellect and instincts to go far in the corporate world, but he has instead decided to dedicate those abilities to spreading social justice at a mere fraction of the profits. Something that impressed me especially was that during the Q&A session he mentioned that he makes special care to document different families in each of his documentaries because he believes having a long-term camera presence in a household could interfere with the natural development of the children. It's difficult to put into words how much that impacted me; he's willing to sacrifice getting a more "poignant" documentary (and also, more success) simply for the well-being of the families he's documenting. This is a man with a strict code of self-imposed ethics and an unrelenting desire to spread the truth.

Unfortunately, at least one of those truths he's uncovered appears to be one founded in a fundamental misunderstanding of his subject. As has been documented again and again from a vast number of different and very trustworthy sources (I have personal experience working with The Guardian and they are about as benevolent and non-partisan as a news agency can be), it would appear Mr. Ash is horribly misguided. He repeatedly mentioned in both our classroom and during the Q&A that followed the that the official reasons the Japanese government has given for a greater number of children afflicted with thyroid cancer is The Screening Effect (by looking for something, you're more likely to find it), but ironically I can't help but wonder if it was Mr. Ash's desire for a gripping story to tell that led him into seeing these (what are, by all appearances) illusory correlations.

There was a moment in the final act of his documentary that tipped his hand a bit. It featured the unseen voice of Mr. Ash behind the camera sparring loudly with the assistant principal of a grade school in Fukushima, begging the man to explain how he could stand by while his children were being exposed to radiation. Rather than the assistant principal holding the austere scowl of an uncaring, money-grubbing businessman who felt no compunction over profiting on the lives of children or his eyes welling up with tears because of what his school was allowing yet was powerless to speak against... he simply stared at Mr. Ash in mild horror. A horror that anyone could think these children were at any risk at all. Mr. Ash wasn't allowed on the school grounds because he threatened to spread "the truth" as Ash claimed; rather he was disallowed because fear-mongering in front of small, easily frightened children is intolerable. And I have to stand in agreement with the assistant principal on this matter, as much as it pains me.

Smartphone Addiction

Found a video today. I think the video is pretty ironic and it does expose a fact. So I want to share with you.

It shows a phenomenon that could be named as "Smartphone Addiction".

 

Have You Forgotten?

Four years ago, an earthquake happened in Japan. For a country, which locates in seismic zone, it might not be a big problem. However, that earthquake was a M9.0 earthquake, which was also the largest one ever recorded in Japan. The most important is that its influences to people were hurtful and horrible, especially the consequences that Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster brought.  

There were enormous news about the accident were reported every day.  Since the location of China is very close to Japan, most of Chinese people concerned about the safety of people in Japan. However, the most impressive to me was that many people bought iodized salt frantically because they were afraid of being contaminated by nuclear radiation. At that time, I felt ridiculous when I saw the news that people even bought the salt in boxes and did not pay much attention on what the people in Japan suffered. Until four years later, when I almost forgot the accident, A2-B-C brings the accident, in particular the people’ lives back to our sights.

I was moved and shocked by this film. Shocked by the fact that people are still living in fear and could not live in a normal life. Moved by those mothers and children. Those smiling faces, sweet and naive look contrast with those mothers’ concern and helpless, I think most of people would be moved by it. Those innocent children, I don't think they know what they are experiences, those older children, who contaminated by radiation and got A2, they might not sure what would happen to them in the future. There’s a scene that they went to meet an officer, a man said that children are country’s treasure, but what are they doing to the treasure? As what I watched in A2-B-C, people in Fukushima like abandoned children by their parent, the government. If it’s not the A2-B-C, I would never know what are happening in Fukushima, and what people in there are suffering.  I think that it’s the power of media, allowing people to know the fact.

After the film finished, a Japanese student played a song – “Have you forgotten”. It sounded sorrowful and helpless, liked the film showed us. Ian said that people asked him what they could do to help those people, but there’s no answer. At least to him, I think the best thing he could do is telling more people about their story by his camera and the social media. Although we don't know what could we do to help those people, what I know is that there’s still someone remember them, remember their experiences. I think that is also why people said they saw hope. Because people have not forgotten those terrible things and people who are suffering. Moreover, it also showed the power of social media, to remind people and raise awareness of those issues like Ian showed us. Then it could become a driving force for people to improve those issues, to make our world better.