This past week attending aya has been great, our professors and guest speakers have really inspired me and I’m sure my classmates can agree with me on this. At the beginning of the week we started with intro to communications and as the week went on we explored the different types of civics which included civic engagement, civic media, and civic imagination.
Throughout the week, I was surprised to find that we were discussing a lot of history, specifically history within the US. Which brought me back to my apush class where we discussed the monopolies, including Carnegie which was mentioned during one of our lessons from the week. Not only that but just learning how a lot of the media started and how it has evolved over time. Something that started through the paper just to inform the people on what was going on in the world to now being able to get information from anywhere as more and more media outlets are created. Things like propaganda were brought up which was also a term which I had heard. Which reminded me of our WW2 unit during apush where the hero captain America was created to encourage young boys to join the military or give the people some sort of hope being the face of WW2.
The use of propaganda has been familiar to the US for a while now, especially during political disagreements within the country, through wars, or really anything which has two sides to as a form to influence the public from a biased point of view. It has been around for a while and I personally think it’s a really interesting form of media.
Moving into civic imagination I think this ties perfectly with propaganda because although propaganda is still used today this was more popular during old times. Which brings me to civic imagination because civic imagination is a sort of form of imagining the future rather than the past which. This was a very interesting topic for me, especially after we talked to Taj Frazier and he introduced an idea of virtual reality that could possibly be more accessible or normal in the future which was a form of civic imagination. It was a form of civic imagination because all this virtual reality idea was just an idea at one point or something “imagined” but now it is actually a real thing and will probably become more popular in the future. Frazier mentioned something while answering questions he shared with us how during his time not everyone carried a smart phone but today almost everyone has a smart phone on them which brought him back to his point of virtual reality, although it sounds unnatural or even still out of reach in the near future this might be a normalized thing. With this the term civic imagination was something I’ve really found interesting and have enjoyed learning about during my time at aya.
Communicating Change 