This year, because I was part of MUN, I was part of organizing UN day. This year’s theme was Youth and Media, which we came up with during the previous MUN meetings. We decided on this topic because today’s young generation is all about media; tv and the social media. That’s how we all connect and how we learn about what is going on all over the world; whether it be serious news about cases like Snowden in America or just fun news about Miley Cyrus’s horrific performance at the VMAs. Through the media, we as the young generation who are influential and can be influenced easily, news gets spread around fast. Furthermore, the media industries knows how to get news spread around fast and know how to make an impact on people especially through the younger generation and at times may tweak information to make it sound greater or more worse than it actually is. Due to the fact that, as people we are more prone to being attracted to news that stands out, thus it seems that there is never ongoing good news, but always ongoing bad news (engage with issues of global importance).
So in order to address on different areas on Youth and Media, we as the MUN group created many different activities for the grades 6-12 so that our community (among the secondary school, since primary and secondary school do different things for UN day) would become more aware of the issues or great things that come from things related to ‘Youth and Media’; on a local and global scale (plan and initiate activities). The senior members of the MUN group were in charge of taking care of the activities for grades 11 and 12 (the two grades are put together as a group). Since we do debates every year, that can often get out of hand, and a few people tend to dominate while the quiet ones don’t participate much, we decided to change it up. One of our members had the idea of splitting the grade 11 & 12 into four different groups; each group being a mix of 11th and 12th graders. Each group would have to create a video that would address an issue under the theme ‘Youth and Media’ and at the end of the session we would all meet in one group to share the video. The length of the video could be as long as they wanted, as long as they included the participation of every member of the group. While, as members instructing one of the groups, me and my friend Wenuri were expecting huge global issues to do with the girl Malala, who was persecuted by the Taliban for standing up against them, our group focused on social media and some of its problems. This wasn’t a problem, just different, but I guess more appropriate and understandable considering that we are teenagers that are practically glued to social media 24/7. Me and Wenuri weren’t part of creating the video, but it was definitely a lot of fun watching them try to make the video a bit comedic, while addressing an important issue that has actually come up among our friends. The issue was the social network. How sometimes random people will “meet” and talk about everything and eventually decide to meet for real, but the other person turns out to be a fraud. Though they presented this issue in a more comedic way, to make it more interesting for an audience, it is actually very creepy and there are many movies about it. A lot of people in our school have actually had problems of impersonation on Facebook, where someone would take all of their photos and create a profile using them, but under a different name. I think it was important, that the group I was watching over took this issue. It turned out to be one of the better ones in comparison to the other videos. Though it is more comedic, it does teach us something about the dangers of the social network, despite its perks, and how we do need to be careful. My mom used to say, when I was young, “don’t talk to strangers” and I remember I always used to think that it was about people you actually meet (in a physical form). And I’m sure that’s what my mom meant, when I was younger. But now, it’s in the virtual world as well, because random people can start talking to you or watch you and it’s actually a lot more difficult to notice because it’s virtual and there’s no control over it. The more I think about it, the more scary it is, and I think most of the time we are all oblivious to its reality and think that it’s far away from us and will never happen to us; and maybe that is true for most, but it’s not a complete guarantee and I think we all should be more aware of that fact, seeing as we, young people, tend to live in our own small fragile little worlds (engage with issues of global importance).
Here’s the link of our MUN group addressing the issue of Youth and Media.
“We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere” 