Npr forum

The other day while I was driving there was a forum discussion on NPR titled "Voice's: Listening, Connecting and Amplifying".... (I took some notes, while driving, so they are a little hard to discern). The jist of the discussion was looking at different routes of technology and how different 'voices' are being heard, which one's we need to listen to more consistently and what the future of communication looks like.

At one point one of the speakers was discussing the idea similar to that which we have discussed in class about setting up a social discourse. He was specifically referring to "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. He was making the point that 20 years ago no one knew really what global warming was or had an opinion on it. The fact that Al was able to A. make a 'power point' B. present it to an audience and C. was able to mass produce and sell it has created a whole new social discourse about global warming.

AND as we said in class this is one form or part of social movements.

One other interesting comment:
In class we have briefly mentioned facebook as it pertains to social movements, just a fact from this forum over 11 million youth have been mobilized by facebook in the past year.

Interesting to note: today while I was at work a man in his 40's and I were talking about the election and he made a comment (he has lived in Harrisonburg for a while, and drives for FedEx) that it seems like way more college students are interested and involved in this election that he has remember in past one's. We talked about a number of reasons for this including the difficulty and un-security in the job market, as well as the general appeal of Obama...just interesting to note his observation and the facebook statistic.