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Community Engagement in Public Communications

Reading through chapter 4 has shown me that how social media have changed how people engage in advocacy and other community related engagement. This can be seen today how politicians and other celebrities goes out to social media platform such as Twitter and Facebook to advocate for change in our society. The shift from physical advocacy engagement to the online one has occurred in a time where social media gives you opportunity to connect with billions of people around the world. This means people can directly spread their message with their followers and help promote it widely if your followers share with others. In the interview with Markiel Simpson, he explained how he was able to reach out to his targeted audience by using Twitter. In Markiel Simpson’s case, he used his Twitter account solely for advocacy engagement and didn’t share any personal stories. This helped build up consistency and allowed users to follow him because they agreed with Simpson’s sentiment. Due to this, Simpson was successful in promoting black representation in school curriculum and build up a base that made this reform possible. Another important point Simpson made was that social media allows you to build up a network that wasn’t possible in the past. This network comes handy for advocating for changes in the community and helps organize events such as fundraisers to help raise money for the cause. Social media have allowed people who are not well represented in the community and are disenfranchised to have a voice that can be amplified and be heard by lot of people in their community. PLN amplifies this by having followers share the original message causing more people having access to the message. However, the ease of communication between people through social media have meant that more false information can be spread. Therefore, it’s important by the community to recognize what’s true and what’s false. Recently, we have seen that this can be dangerous which we saw in the storming of the United States Capitol. It is really important to distinguish between true and false information otherwise there can be consequences.

Personally, I believe PLN is a great way to raise awareness regarding multiple topics we face in our community. Topics such as climate change, racial inequality, social injustice and economic issues can be discussed in social media and raise awareness of these issues which lot of the people didn’t know much about.

Reference:

Clark, J., & Aufderheide, P. (2013). A New Vision for Public Media – Open, Dynamic, and Participatory. In J. Pooley, L. Taub-Pervizpour, & S. C. Jansen (Authors), Media and social justice (pp. 55-67). New York: Palgrave.

Miller, Jesse. “EDCI 338 – 2021 – 02 – 22 Markiel Simpson.” YouTube, 22 Feb. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCSpm1Lx8-A&feature=youtu.be.