Look Different. Speak Out. In 2009, the year I graduated high school, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States and my parents’ generation decided that meant racism was finally over. The mindset of “color-blindness” is a pervasive problem that facilitates the perpetuation of social systems that consistently harm people of color unproportionally to the rest of the population. But this facet of our modern discourse on social issues is in no way reserved to race. Whether its race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class or even sex the average American is so cripplingly afraid to voice any socially incorrect opinion that we have become silent, avoiding the difficult conversations about cultural biases and systemic inequality. But silence will never make these problems go away. I see in our generation—the infamous millennials—a passion for change, a constant questioning of why things are the way they are, and an urge to address inequality on a global scale. But living in a system constructed by such broken ideologies, we have few outlets to voice our concerns. To get the conversation started, and begin to address systemic inequality in a meaningful way, active youth need a safe space to voice their opinions regarding the complicated, personal, and emotionally taxing issues of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination. This is why I believe MTV’s Look Different campaign is so important, and why I am excited to submit my concept Look Different. Speak Out. as a platform for safe and respectful discussion of social issues and personal biases.
Look Different. Speak Out. Look Different. Speak Out. will be an interactive sound-scape to crowd-source the social mindset of our generation. On the Speak Out platform participants will be able to record a short audio file voicing a thought, fear, or story about personal biases or discrimination. Each recording would have a 15 seconds clip limit—just a little longer than a Vine or a Snapchat video. In a world where privacy is practically non-existent and every conversation can be saved or sold for ad dollars, Speak Out needs to allow users to voice their honest opinions without the fear of judgment or condemnation. Submission will be completely anonymous to encourage user to express themselves openly and without embarrassment. A recorded audio file, however, remains far more personal than a text entry or blog post, and gets participants comfortable with vocalizing their opinions around social issues.
Look Different. Speak Out. After a participant records a sound clip, they will be able to add social issue tags to indicate what topics they are addressing, such as “Homophobia” “Gender” or “Sexuality.” Tags could also be used to categorize sound clips by current events, like “Ray Rice” “Emma Watson UN” or “Ferguson,” or they could add tags to indicate affiliations with specific popular media, like “Booty” “Beyoncé” or “Teen Wolf.”
RACE FEMINISM INTERRACIAL COUPLES
GENDER SEX
HOMOPHOBIA
SEXUALITY
All of the clips are then clustered by the tags in a massive cloud of talking points. Users can search topic areas like “Race” or “Feminism” and then zoom into the portion of the clustered audio files that fit those tags. Users could then choose to listen to individual files or play all the clips that are relevant to specific tags to hear shared thoughts and stories from other youth around the country—a joint narrative constructed by the brief words of dozens of separate voices.
Collections of different perspectives on specific issues will come together to reveal the social zeitgeist of our generation.
Look Different. Speak Out. While Speak Out will be working to encourage youth to be comfortable voicing their opinions on social issues and confronting their own biases, it will also allow users to listen to other’s stories and learn about issues that we often deal with in isolation. We can use a shared dialogue to build empathy and understanding across racial, gender, and sexual boundaries. Each significant tag cluster will also have a forum affiliated with it, where users can comment on the direction of the dialogue, share photos or videos, and respond to the overall message of the emergent narrative. Again, we want this to be a safe environment where no one can be attacked for voicing their opinion, so people would not be able to respond to individual sound clips. Even misinformed opinions should be included in the hopes that other’s voices will lead those individuals to a more socially sustainable understanding of their relationship to race, gender, and sexual discrimination. Any messages propagating hate or violence should, however, be removed from the conversation.
FEMINISM
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Supporting @EmWatson and #HeForShe. We owe it to our mothers, sisters and all the dispossessed women of the world http://www.heforshe.org
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Look Different. Speak Out. With the forum feature, participants and casual users will be able to have more in-depth conversations around issues and share resources while preserving the simplicity of individual expression through the audio recordings. Users will also be able to share any individual audio clips, tag clusters, or forum posts via social media to encourage dissemination and spread the conversation. #SpeakOut The Speak Out platform is not a final solution to the problems of racism, sexism, or homophobia; it is a starting point—a vehicle to enable safe conversations and open discourse. The first step to address a problem is admitting it exists and discussing it. A platform like Speak Out will be both familiar to users who are constantly sharing everything online but revolutionary in terms of the concepts and conversations being shared—especially when backed by such a significant agent of cultural change such as MTV. I believe that our generation will be the one to address the social issues of systemic inequality, not out of the goodness of our hipster-hearts, but because if we don’t things will fall apart. Rape threats have become a common response to vocal feminism and unarmed teenagers are being murdered by police in the streets. The current conditions of our social structure are simply unsustainable. While we weren’t the ones to create these problems, it falls on us to address them. We need to do something to stop these injustices before it is too late.
We need to Speak Out.
Thanks for the opportunity, and feel free to check out my portfolio of work regarding media for social transformation at JosephRW.com or contact me at JosephRobertWheeler@gmail.com