The culmination of our project was the last day activity – creative action. Our mission was to pay people’s attention to the problem of propaganda and lies in the media. For this mission we chose the most famous street in Kyiv – Khreshchatyk. We prepared newspapers with holes which symbolize missing facts and damaged information. Then we sat in the city centre and started our action with handing out stickers to people. “I question what I read” was our motto and it was written on our poster and stickers.
After only a few minutes people started to come and ask about our action. After a half an hour we handed out all of the stickers and had a lot of people that we've talked to. Some asked a lot of questions about our message, some wanted to discuss the topic and some stopped just to take a picture with us or thank for our activity.
It is very important to think critical and analyze information that we consume every day. So that was a great experience to remind this important thing to people.
There are some comments from participants about their impressions:
“I really enjoyed the experience. I was pretty sure before, that nobody would care about us. So I was very excited, that the people looked at our action and talked with us about the topic.” (Lars)
“While we were discussing what action to make I was skeptical, because the message “I question what I read” somehow felt like supporting people who believe in conspiracy theories. After the action I talked to American women who told me: “Yes, you are right. The only truth is the bible”. I answered that this wasn’t our message. It is so difficult because every person chooses which information to believe depending on his or her own opinion. It was exciting to sit there and see people looking at us. I would have liked to understand Ukrainian language because I guess it was interesting what people said. In the end I was really happy how much dialogue happened around us, even though I couldn’t understand what they were talking. And I especially liked the sticker we handed out, because they looked so professional.” (Marlene)
"Creative action" (one of our tasks during the project) was about making the key message and realizing it in a creative way. It was really a great experience! And it was effective because we spread social appeal in very simple and creative way and it attracted attention of everybody. Newspapers that we showed were with holes and it means the high amount of "empty" or pointless information that we consume in every kind of media, not only printed but also in social media. I think that every social action should have key message and symbol (poster, stickers), which would demonstrate this appeal to a large audience. Only when the call is expressed by a symbol or actions associated with this symbol, such a peaceful demonstration will be successful. And I think our team managed it successfully. It was evident from the reaction of the people that such a problem is really relevant and we need to be more conscious in order not to become puppets in the media environment of information giants.” (Zoryana)
“I really liked organizing the action. I think that it was pretty successful. We had creative idea and important message that we have spread. People paid attention, came to talk about it and even took pictures of us. Since that I started to love fleshmobs as a tool for self-expression and sharing thoughts.” (Masha)
Viktoriia
