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By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Spreading Your Story

Spreading Your Story was the third webinar in the Storytelling and Digital-Age Civics series, held on January 21, 2014. Moderator Derek Williams was joined by Henry Jenkins, Rubi Fregoso (KCET Departures’ Youth Voices), Nirvan Mullick (Caine’s Arcade short film), Thea Aldrich (Random Hacks of Kindness), Joshua Merchant (Off/Page Project) and Kat Primeau (Laughter For a Change) to discuss strategies for sharing and circulating your story.

The participants discussed the following questions during the webinar:

Can you describe a successful example where your group helped to generate a story which mattered in terms of the larger conversations around your cause? What factors do you think contributed to that success?
How do you try to make media that spreads? Do you try to take specific steps to help facilitate circulations? What are these steps?
In what ways do you seek to inspire your community to help spread the story? How do you move the story beyond your own community and into a larger conversation?
Do you have to dummy-down your message in order to make it spread virally?
How do you define success for your campaign?
People have argued that social media based activism sparks a superficial emotional response but does not result in deep, long-term commitments to a cause. What have you observed about people who first discovered your organization as a result of participating in some effort to spread a video or other message across the web?

The third webinar examined how participants spread their stories and how stories get circulated among a variety of audiences. Thea Aldrich, community manager of Random Hacks of Kindness, emphasized the power of the public that activists engage. She advises others to “be comfortable with an idea or narrative taking on a life of its own…because it’s about the community, it’s not up to us to decide where it goes. Trying to control it limits its potential.” According to Nirvan Mullick, the founder of Imagination Foundation: “The irony is the more personal your story is, the more universal it is. And the more you keep that nuance that makes your story personal, the more it will spread. Rubi Fregoso, director for KCET Departures’ Youth Voices, and her student Raul described focusing on the local level by turning a vacant lot into a dog park. With civic projects like this, they sought to encourage student leadership within their own community. Moderator Derek followed the above comments by asking the activists how they measure success. Kat Primeau, from improv comedy outreach non-profit Laughter for a Change, cautioned against relying solely on view counts and hits, saying that with improv comedy “you see success in the room when you see people having fun,” but that experience may get lost online. All of these examples demonstrated how each of these activists had a different sense of the scale with which they would like to share their story and whom their intended audience was. Their success then was not based on the number of followers, but if their stories reached those they were trying to reach.

Don’t have time to watch the full webinar? The MAPP team also published highlights from this series on Henry Jenkins’ blog, and key moments from Webinars 1 & 2 and Webinars 3 & 4.

Looking for an overview of the series as a whole? MAPP Project Director Sangita Shresthova also published “Learn to Listen. Really Listen: ‘Storytelling and Digital Age Civics’ Series Artists and Activists Share Seven Key Insights” on Digital IS.

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CLTV - Storytelling & Digital-Age Civics: Spreading Your Story - 1/21/2014