So I came across this article on Mashable and I found it moving how a global movement can arise from sharing acts of kindness on social media. There’s a viral drinking game known as NekNominate where players film themselves drinking large quantities of alcohol and nominating other friends to do the same. One particular player, Brent Lindeque, was nominated and decided to use this opportunity to raise awareness on global concerns such as hunger and poverty through filming his acts of kindness. Instead of NekNominate, the new challenge became RAKNomination (short for Random Acts of Kindness). Soon this challenge became viral and people everywhere started filming themselves showing kindness to people in need.
First I don’t understand why people would accept a challenge to film themselves downing large amounts of alcohol and encourage others to do so. Just because something is viral doesn’t mean it’s always wise or in this case safe. However, people such as Brent utilized this viral trend as an opportunity to intervene and spread kindness through YouTube. My question is: Why do people feel inclined to use social media outlets like YouTube as a platform to encourage foolish acts instead of using it to raise awareness or make a positive impact in the world? Why aren’t more social media platforms being portrayed as tools to change the world for the better instead of tools that encourage stupidity and harm?
I think that social media platforms ARE used to raise awareness now more than ever. A lot of it depends on who posts what kind of things on your feed “what’s trending”. When KONY 2012 hit, the first platform to really solve the KONY crisis (that the directors of the program were actually capitalizing on a lot of the profits, and that there was little that foreign influence could do) was Facebook: the video was shared so frequently that people heard about it and then went so far as to research the profits behind the movement. It might be that we notice more of the provocative and stupid video trends on Facebook because they are so ridiculous and often shocking, and as for statuses promoting awareness: we may just glance past those because we are almost inclined to want to see ridiculous things.
We are in a age that we have to share that we think is ‘cool.’ When they made the video I bet they were thinking how ‘cool’ it would be to video tape the drinking challenge. But everybody isn’t same and Brent Lindeque is the proof of that. It is really good to see people bringing out good from something bad and may b e lethal.