Can we make the difference?

On the internet today there are many websites devoted to the nature of campaigning. More and more young people, especially students, are getting invloved in the change of major issues. In order for us to understand where and how these ideas are developed we had to (in groups) think of a campaign idea and make a campaign video for it. My group chose to campagin to stop the idea of students having to do complusory community service to repay loan debts. Our video and campaign was called 'Students Against Community Service'. We used Channel 4's Battlefront website to gather ideas for our video. After watching numerous videos we chose to do something that we could relate to and that would effect our lives. This then developed into the idea that we shouldn't do something too serious as students are more likely to relate to a more humorous and light hearted campagin video. All this lead to the following video.




We chose the topic of 'Students Against Compulsory Community Service' because it was an issue close to our everyday life. Should the idea become reality it would be us that would 'suffer' as a result. We thought that choosing a topic close to our lives would create a good 'buzz' among students and student communities. We also all had strong negative opinions about the idea of having to do compulsory community service for gaining our degree, when the government is willing to allow us to pay back our loans once we have a decent job.

We chose to make our video simple as we believed students would listen more if there was only one thing to focus on. The humour element provides a more 'laid-back' approach to campaigning, still serious about the topic but making it more approachable for the audience to get involved. We encouraged participation by giving web addresses for Facebook and Twitter pages. We chose to advertise the pages on social networks rather than creating a webpage because, being students ourselves, we know that our campaign would get much more attention on a social networking site. We didn't make a facebook page for this topic because there already is one but we did create a twitter page.

The overall aim of this activity was to gain an understanding about how easy and beneficial it is to campaign for what you believe in and what could be changed. It is easier to make a difference in society than many of us think and espcially as a young person/student it can be hard to be heard but with the community of campaigning, using such sites as Battlefront, we are able to make that difference. This is where facebook and twitter can be very effective.