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