Social Action Project Introduction

• Discuss the broader digital media and social justice topic, issue or cause that your social action project will respond to? What is the ethical, historical and/or political significance of this topic, issue or cause? (250 words)

My suggestion for a topic on the social action project is digital waste. I would like to inform the public about “recycling” and where our digital waste is really going. I’d like to inform them that most major recycling companies unsafely ship E-waste away for others to deal with instead of ensuring it is safely recycled in their own hands. I would like to show them what wastelands build up to become and show the unhealthy conditions undeveloped countries are forced to live in. I think the majority of society has no clue that recycling centers simply label digital waste as donations and then ship it all away overseas to undeveloped nations. I for one was shocked when I enrolled in this class and listened to the first speaker inform us of this issue. I became more disgusted as I learned more and more about it throughout the course and I would like to raise awareness.

The ethical significance this topic has is in my opinion, is that morally the whole concept is just not right. We have an advantage over these undeveloped nations. We are naturally born with more in a better living environment. They can’t choose the country that they were born into. We are born with privileges they don’t have. We should be helping them to live a better life and have better amenities; technology medication and clean water. Instead we trick them by telling them that we are donating electronics to help advance their nations technologically. We should genuinely be making donations that can help them advance, instead of donating garbage to them that make their living conditions worse. This would be the ethical thing to do. On top of it all, even though they are the ones suffering now in the long run we all live on the same earth and our great-great grandchildren will be dealing with even a bigger issue right alongside of theirs. We need to fix the issue now, invest in research and come up with a better solution before its too late instead of taking the easy way out.

• Describe the type of social action project that you have identified.  Offer examples of how it has been used in the past. Why does this type of project form an appropriate response to the specific topic, issue or cause introduced above? (250 words) 

Produce a documentary, I saw the documentary supersize me and immediately knew that this would be a good way to get a message across to the public. I was forced to watch the video three times throughout school years and it really put an impact on my food choices and how I viewed fast food. I next related to the Kony 2012 video. I was reminded about in class Wednesday, and this is when I initially began to realize that producing a documentary would be very affective. Kony 2012 was very informative and influential. I think that producing a YouTube video that could possibly go viral is one of the easiest ways for a class such as ours to get a message across to a wider public.

Getting the message out about where our digital waste is going would be easy to incorporate in a video format. In the background we could have a catchy sound playing to keep the listeners attention. We could create animations to over-exaggerate waste dumping and transport. We can animate young boys burning toxic materials and even younger boys walking around with magnets to pick up scrap metals left behind.  Another thing we can animate is the health affects. We can show people living in that environment getting sick. At the end we should show real pictures of actual digital wastelands to get the message thickly across the viewer’s heads.

After the Video is created we could share the link on every social network everyone in the class has. We can message our friends and ask them to do the same. We can then publicly post the video to popular pages and blogs. In comment sections we can comment the link to this video. I think if the video is posted by everyone in the class it will get more views and raise more awareness then we even realize.