It is often said that the reason why most young people don’t volunteer is because they follow the thought bubble of “I am only one person. What can I do? How can I make a change that will impact the world?” I am a firm believer in change starting with one person. Maybe that sounds cliché but let me start with a name - Wael Ghonim. A marketing manager for Google, he became the symbol of the revolution Egypt - all because he reached out to Egyptian youth on Facebook to organize the January 25th protests.
The role of social media is easily dismissed as a trend that young people will latch onto and then get tired of once the next ‘in’ thing comes along. But have you ever stopped to think of the actual influence social media has? What can Twitter, FaceBook and Youtube do to help you impact millions of lives?
If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. Almost a million people use Facebook in Sri Lanka - that is almost 5% of the population. Twitter is the fastest way to campaign and spread a message or to share news quickly and efficiently. YouTube helps people become citizen journalists - to have the ability to video from your cellphone or digital camera, upload it and have it go viral.
Making your voice heard about issues that you are passionate about has never been easier. It is as if we have created a club that is open to literally any view point from the mundane to the controversial, that is half a billion people strong and is growing faster than any other club ever has. It gives us the ability to share our ideals and viewpoints in front of all of our friends (and strangers), whenever we want to, for as long as we want to, free of charge. It is a world that we can literally carry in our pockets, at hand to record a video or share an opinion whenever the need arises. This is what I call democracy action, a raucous cacophony of viewpoints shared by you and spreading across the world in a matter of seconds.
According to Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, 45 million status updates are made per day. Raising awareness towards issues is the single most important thing a volunteer can do as that is what encourages discourse and opinion. Imagine if you used your Facebook page as space to get your message across to as wide an audience as possible as well as raising awareness on the project that you have done.
This way people are aware of what you do and also of how to get involved. It lets you inspire others to make a change in their communities, in whatever way they can. And more importantly, it teaches us a very simple but great lesson - that every one of us has the potential to be something great in our lifetime, to influence policy and bring about change in our communities on a grass-root level. The trend line suggests that Facebook will reach 3 billion users, which is roughly half the planet, by 2017.
Think of how many people you can reach by starting an initiative that you are passionate about by creating a cause on Facebook, using Twitter to keep people updated on the status of your project and posting videos of the end result on Youtube. Now do you still believe that you cannot make a change? Make no mistake, the real social media revolution is only just getting started and it almost always starts with one person who believes that he or she can be the change. The question is what about you?
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