Blog Prompt #1: The Contemporary Public Sphere

Public life and the public sphere are alive!  When thinking about class lecture and society as a whole, the public sphere is provided for in many ways today.  Platforms to speak are not only widely available, but they are also filtering into parts of society, like high school, that they may not have originally reached.

Project Soapbox is a program that high school educators can set up for their students to participate in two minute speeches of the student's choice to address issues of society.  This is an attempt to allow young students to have the opportunity to shape their communities and voice issues important to them.

The part of Project Soapbox that I find important is the need for students to deliver a speech to an audience.  I find this critical to the development of young people today because as a high school teacher I have seen firsthand the impact of social media on students over the past few years.  I feel the personal delivery gives the students more influence that what is seen over social media ,which has been diluted over time.

Social media is vast with some avenues being popular today and extinct tomorrow.  Considering this, having multiple online public spheres is a bad thing for our society currently because it not only leads to a fragmentation and polarization of people, but it seems to occupy a high level of importance for people compared to other forms of delivery.  Seeing how pervasive social media is today (in schools and government for example) distracts us from being connected to one another in more ways than just handle or hash tag.

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