How Social Media will Save Us

[Music]

greetings

cintia namaskar social media has a way

of making the ordinary extraordinary

all it takes is a well-timed joke a

chance encounter

or provocative hashtag and suddenly the

whole world

is trending on a previously unknown

person

many of us complain about social media

some of us are addicted to it

and often it’s seen as the source of

fake news

cyber bullying and hate speech but the

real power

of social media is not in how it divides

and isolates us but in the greater power

it has

to educate to curate to expose

to explain social media has the key

to preserving our past and it may very

well

save our future nelson mandela once

famously said

if you speak to a man in a language he

understands it goes to his head

but if you speak to him in his language

it goes to his heart

this became clear to me the morning i

woke up and found my face plastered

across newspapers

after speaking to a reporter about a

simple project i had started

with a notebook and an instagram account

see my husband is from india

and if you incorrectly assumed that his

native tongue is hindi

you wouldn’t be the first hindi is just

one of

23 official languages

used in indian governments and it’s

spoken by

only just over a quarter of the 1.3

billion

indian citizens my husband is from the

southern state of kerala

home to the language of malayalam spoken

by over

40 million malayalis yet there aren’t

many resources

for non-native speakers to learn this

language from

being a language teacher myself and a

very stubborn one at that

i used a pdf of a textbook from the

1960s

a linguistical analysis of malayalam

grammar

and the ever-thinning patience of my

husband

to create a study gram to document my

learning journey

this made a lot of people excited you

see

while everyone is in the rush to learn

english here is the humble americans

attempt at learning malayalam

my words poorly pronounced made their

way into the hearts of thousands around

the world

the fact that i was learning this

language wasn’t what made it interesting

it was the fact that someone from

outside the community took this language

and gave it a value that it didn’t have

in mainstream media

when your language gets sidelined in

favor of english due to globalization

and it finally reaches some kind of

publicity you feel seen

language is deeply tied to identity

my stepmother immigrated from former

yugoslavia to chicago in the 1970s

she became fully fluent in english but

maintained her mother tongue at home for

communication within her family

however after marrying my father who had

very little

interest in learning the language my

half brother grew up

not being exposed enough to become

fluent in his own mother tongue

now at 24 he feels quite sturdy in his

american identity

but doesn’t have much tying him to his

slavic roots which are half his dna

his story is just one of the hundreds of

millions

of those whose mother tongues have slid

through the cracks

in fact it is estimated that 22

languages per year will die

given up his offerings taken as

sacrifices in exchange for the promise

of a better future

identity is not the only thing lost when

a language dies it is also information

as indigenous languages

dim and fade so do ecological concepts

that could be very essential now in this

age of the increased need for

sustainability

descriptions of plants animals and

agricultural practices

fade over time as the tongue becomes

unfamiliar with the language

that the land once had new generations

of these communities can’t even

comprehend their own oral history and

traditions

because they aren’t taught the language

which their elders speak

vietnam is home to dozens of languages a

testament

of its diversity but as these

mountainous

communities and linguistic minorities

assimilate

to majority languages their knowledge

too will become lost

we often see signs in english french and

vietnamese but would anyone be able to

recognize a sign written in

nung social media has the power to

preserve languages

all it takes is for someone to upload a

video or other

kinds of educational engaging content to

support these linguistic communities

no longer do people need to search for

old books with outdated formats of

language learning

and it doesn’t just stop with language

when i was in college i lived in the

foothills of the appalachia and the

southern united states

back then we only had myspace and the

now defunct xango where i would write my

angsty teenage poetry

i worked at a photo department in a

retail drugstore chain

one day i received a large order of 300

photos

as i watched the photos print from the

machine i noticed

gorgeous landscapes mountains and

forests and untouched nature

when my customer came to pick up her

order i complimented the photos and

asked her where they were taken

she smiled at me oh my daughter is

serving a

military tour in afghanistan she sent

these pictures

if you had asked me what afghanistan

looked like

i would have imagined a barren war-torn

region

nothing like these photos that i had

seen

and i realized that even though i

considered myself to be a worldly

educated open-minded person i actually

knew very little outside of my

prescribed schooling

in fact it wasn’t until college that i

was studying the rich kingdoms across

the nations of africa that

at some point in history were wealthier

than various kingdoms in europe

even more embarrassing to admit i didn’t

even realize till i moved to the middle

east that arabs have a variety of

complexions

the reason i didn’t know this is because

of the euro-centric colonialist

narrative that i was taught from growing

up and i didn’t have any other exposure

to any other kind of narrative that

would allow me to question it

what social media does is it allows a

variety of narratives to exist

people can upload stories representing

their communities

and show the stories behind their people

people from these communities can show

exactly what happened as it happened and

tell it with their own voice

a way of saying yes we are here yes

this did happen and no no amount of

whitewashing will remove

this history from these pages

so whether it’s photographs of japanese

prisoners at internment camps in america

or videos of indigenous alaskans

performing traditional dances to

contemporary rap

social media allows for a advanced web

of

narratives that empower the narrators

which brings me to my next point

when you google vietnam what do you

usually see

once you scroll past the news articles

and a few of the big business pages

you’ll find tour guides or video

travel vlogs related to vietnam and

they’re usually made by people who have

little to no connection to the country

itself

which means that if someone wants to

learn about vietnam they’re learning

about it through another foreigner

this can reduce the rich culture of

vietnam in the history

to just simply eating durian and

drinking egg coffee

when i went to the women’s museum here

in hanoi

i read on the 47 different cultures

the 47 different ethnic groups that

reside within the region

as i walked through each exhibit

learning about marriage

child-bearing and domestic duties it

occurred to me that

many of us who live outside of vietnam

would see the country as a monolith

there would be no nuance or diversity

within the peoples inside of it it also

occurred to me that the vietnamese

people themselves may also

start to forget these differences within

their cultures

in the future as globalization continues

what social media does is it allows

people within these communities to make

themselves seen and document their

traditions without having to

appeal to big media houses or get

approval from education boards to be

featured in a textbook

not only does it connect people in the

communities within the motherland

but it also connects the diaspora which

means that someone who has grown up

outside of their country or their

culture

doesn’t have to learn about themselves

through a tourist

social media is not just a place to

bring together communities it’s also a

place to educate and bring attention to

social issues

when my content became viral i gained

over

10 000 followers in less than 30 days

and it has continued to rise since then

most of my followers are indians who are

quite frankly fascinated with this white

girl trying to speak a

lesser known indian language but with

this attention also came a sense of

responsibility

that i need to be sure that i portray

kerala culture in a nuanced and balanced

way

as well as feature other creators within

the community

doing similar things but not getting the

attraction they deserve

now after getting the elusive blue tick

and getting closer to 40 000 followers

it remains clear to me

that i continue to create educational

helpful content

as well as engage with social issues

with working with other creators that

help guide my content

if you’re not a fan of social media i

understand

at first glance all the pointless

selfies the hyper colorful food picks

and the privileged aesthetic of a

backpacker can be

really putting off however these same

tools

that can make someone

from anyone are the same tools that we

can use

to link our past to our future

american author jonathan mayberry once

wrote a sword in itself is not good or

evil

a sword can be used to slay an enemy a

sword can be used to

free a suffering friend into the

darkness a sword can be used to

cut the ropes of the helpless a raised

sword can be a threat

but it can also be a symbol of

leadership a weapon is only good or evil

in the intention of those who hold it

so because of fake news and hate speech

we tend to see social media

as a divisive destructive weapon but in

the hands

of the compassionate and the optimistic

we can use it to cut a path

that will connect us i’d like to end

this talk

with a quote from the malayali poet

paleto narayana menon

bharatam in a puritan

when you hear the name of the indian

subcontinent

you should be filled with pride when you

hear the name of kerala

the blood should boil in your veins

i hope that everyone has a chance to

feel their heart pumping with pride

when they hear of their native place

their native people

are their native tongue no matter where

they end up in the world

nani come on thank you