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From Complacency to Advocacy - by Sarah Foreman

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  • Page ID
    186600

    • Sarah Foreman at Pima Community College
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    For my project, I posted the "Urgent Solutions for Urgent Times" video on my Facebook page. I chose the chapter titled “Climate and Our Planet”. I asked my followers and friends to watch this chapter specifically and leave a comment on any feelings, thoughts, or reactions they may have had to the video. Initially, I was concerned that I would not get enough feedback to generate content for a complete project. I did not get as much feedback as I would've preferred, but I got some, and the lack of feedback is a point I will be able to touch on as well.

    I posted the article one week ago, and I wanted to give it enough time to hopefully get more reactions and comments on it. The comments stopped coming in around four days after I posted the video, but I thought there may be some “stragglers”! Most of the interactions with the post were in the form of reactions to the post itself. I got mostly “care” reactions, some likes, and some “sad” reactions. If I saw the video on my timeline and watched it, I would probably leave a care reaction as well. The tactics used in the video definitely get you to feel emotional about the issues in our world. Although there isn’t a way to see how many people saw the post and scrolled past without reading or interacting, I would guess that most of my followers did that. I feel that most people generally wouldn’t take the time to watch an informative video, especially not to leave a comment about it. I got seven comments under the video. Three of those comments were very generic, such as, “Interesting video.” While I appreciated the engagement, these types of comments did not give me much to report on.

    The other comments were a bit more in-depth, but still not very long. One of the most interesting comments was from a family friend who also grew up in Tucson. They commented that they felt Tucson had been “getting hotter every summer!” as well as feeling like the number of big rains we got for each monsoon decreased. I would agree with these statements, and I believe climate change becomes more impactful as a concern when we feel its effects seeping into our own lives. When I look back to my childhood, it seemed as though the monsoon brought big, sweeping storms every afternoon. I remember splashing in the puddles, digging moats in the dirt of our yard, and creating boats to flow down the streams created on the roads. Everything seems bigger and better in childhood, but I feel as though those storms come only once or twice a year now. It is a lot easier to notice these patterns when you look back cumulatively rather than day by day, but it also makes it easier to fall into a false narrative.

    Another comment I received, this time from a family member, talked about how the video made them think of the number of forest fires we have each summer. They mentioned the biggest forest fire in the summer of 2020 that burned down the north side of Mt Lemmon. While our fires are nothing at the level of the Australian bushfires that were featured in the video I shared, they can still feel just as scary. The forest fires we experience in Tucson can creep close to our homes and seem as though they can’t be stopped. The fact that forest fires are becoming more common in places where they didn't use to be, such as Oregon and Washington, is a wake-up call. On the same platform on which I shared the video, I remember my friends and family posting images of the forest fires each summer, with the red-hot flickers against the dark and smoky summer sky. Although beautiful, they are destroying habitats and ruining the homes of humans and animals alike.

    I wish I had received more insightful comments to talk about, however, I understand. The world is paced so fast nowadays, and people want to scroll and get instant gratification. Even stopping to watch five or six minutes of an impactful video can feel like too much of a commitment. I can’t judge,  I can be that way as well. Learning about something like climate change is probably not why people go to Facebook. Instead, they would rather see some family photos, learn about the latest Kardashian drama, and log off in order to get back to a busy life. My project may have gone better if I selected a different website to post to, however, I would have lost the personal aspect of it. I considered posting the video to Reddit, as I feel that people would be more engaged there due to it being more of a forum and less of a typical social media site. The only issue with that is most people tend to be anonymous, and I was looking forward to seeing how people I knew personally connected with the video as part of the project.

    Overall I am happy I received some comments, and I hope that more of my followers watched the video than it appeared. The video truly impacted me, with its emotional tone and sensitive subjects, so I wanted more people to be moved by it. It made me want to be the change in the world, even if there is not much that one individual like me could do. Being made aware of other people's hardships and perspectives through these times can push others from complacency to advocacy, and I believe that is the main tactic of persuasion the video employed.

    This page titled From Complacency to Advocacy - by Sarah Foreman is shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sarah Foreman at Pima Community College.