Thursday, October 2, 2008

Leah Katz-Hernandez: The New Media

This is a Vlog about how New Media has a positive impact on the politicians' ability to outreach to the deaf community in terms of accessibility, better information distribution, ease of networking, and more. I see a huge potential but we are not fully there.

TRANSCRIPT:

Leah Katz-Hernandez: Hi, if you’re curious about how politicians learn their game, how to win, how to perfect a successful campaign, how to get votes for themselves… then here is the answer. I was fascinated by what interesting things I learned today during an all-day seminar here in Washington DC. They explain so much through an intensive set of workshops all day. Basically, the concept is the same as if you have a career in teaching and you would go to a conference for teachers where they have workshops explaining how to improve teaching strategies. For psychologists, there’s conferences where those with careers in psychology learn about new diagnosis, treatments, and so on. Again, it’s the same thing with politics. They do have conferences for political careers. Here, they explain how to capture and enthrall target voters, how to target, what makes a successful campaign, and many more things. The list goes on. One thing I found particularly interesting was the subject of Traditional Media and New Media – like blogs and vlogs. As I watched the panel, I realized that I’m part of the New Media. You see, the deaf people have truly immersed themselves into the New Media. However, for the politicians – New Media is a hot new thing to them. So when you consider that before today, deaf people were harder to reach for the politicians due to the traditional media. Campaign tactics would often include phone-calling and canvassing – and it didn’t work because it alienated the deaf people. But today we have newer technology: Emails, vlogs, and blogs… they’re all new things and accessible to the deaf people. So that means that we truly do have the potential to become a stronger voting bloc. Politicians should pay attention to us the deaf people!

4 comments:

mishkazena said...

Leah,

I think it's superb that you and other Gallaudet students are receiving valuable education on being proactive in politics. The students are given opportunities, with interpreters, to participate in the democratic process. Yes, it is a rocky start, with problems with interpreting, etc. However, I don't think we had these opportunites for Deaf students over a decade ago.

tayler said...

It's seldom that vlogs or videos are captioned, and when they are not, we are left behind. Maybe if you should encounter any politicians running for office, ask them to include everyone by captioning their "new media" videos. Keep up the impressive work!

A Deaf Pundit said...

Makes sense to me! Hopefully this will encourage more of us in the Deaf Community to become more politically active, and for us to caption our vlogs. After all, if *we* peons can, then the politicians have no excuse! That will increase accessibility and true equality for us!

Thanks for sharing, Leah. :)

Anonymous said...

Leah, you're right that new media like vlogs and blogs do get people's attention. Now, it is easier to get people's attention than it was years ago. Hope more people will be focused on politics! Good vlog, keep up!

-Jehanne