What is advocacy? Before AYA, I’d have probably answered: to physically go out and fight for something. Now, after 4 days of readings, guest speakers, and lectures, I find that advocacy is a little more complicated than that. There’s so many different factors and forms that make up advocacy, from little graphics to online activism, which all fight for a cause. In this reflection on my first week of AYA, I hope to talk about these 2 forms of advocacy which only make up a small portion of everything I’ve learned in a mere 4 days.
One of the forms of advocacy I learned in COMM 101 is graphic design. I had never considered the use of graphic design to contribute to civic engagement, because in media, graphics are typically used to promote something. I was introduced to a few forms of graphic design that are commonly used for civic means: infographics, zines, and data visualizations. Infographics blend visuals and text for structured storytelling, data visualizations contain numerical trends and analysis of them, and zines are DIY, personal works of images and text, and usually have countercultural narratives, which means they oppose mainstream society. One of the readings was W.E.B Du Bois’ 500 photographs that he curated for the 1900 Paris Exposition, which consisted of photographs showing various Black lives along with many graphs of data relating to Black people in America, illustrating their progress after emancipation. I thought these photographs were beautiful and highly innovative for the period, but it also showed me that normal pictures of everyday lives can help convey a message. It made me realize that despite statistics being the most frequent way of backing up a claim or goal, the people that those statistics are about might be even more effective. Zines also fascinated me because of their highly cultural aspect, spawning from 60s avant-garde movements. These zines were radical forms of expression against consumer society and embraced the act of DIY. I believe they’re very organic and more fun and representative of their creators. Zines would be the main form of graphic design I would use for civic engagement, mainly because of their cultural history and expressionism.
Online activism is more complicated because the level of engagement varies from the way it is practiced. I learned the term “slacktivism,” and I believe it could be applied to some forms of online activism. To take a real life example, big corporations showing their support for the LGBTQ+ community during Pride Month by changing the colors of their logo is “slacktivism” to me. I think this term could be applied to much of online activism, but I still see some value in it. After all, the media is a powerful tool and can easily facilitate real movements for change. But this could go both ways, pushing both liberal and conservative agenda. Along with this, the media can also be incorrectly used and sometimes fail to make change at all. To show a real life example, the “We the People” petitioning system created under the Obama administration was able to send real petitions directly to the U.S. government, but only 3 out of 268 petitions have actually led to legislative change. Also, it has, at one point, been used by people to ask how much the construction of a Death Star from Star Wars would cost. The failure of this petitioning system shows the ineffectiveness of such online forms of political engagement that are open to anybody. By the end of these 3 weeks, I hope I’m able to make an evaluation on the effectiveness of the media, and how I can use it as a youth advocate to support me and help other people use it too.
I’ve learned a lot from these 4 days of COMM 101, and the two things I’ve mentioned in this reflection show that I’ve learned to think more critically and also consider the effectiveness of different forms of civic engagement.
Communicating Change 