Your power, your voice
Thank you Beyza Akay for your valuable contribution and your strong willing to make the voices of young people heard!
Hello World! It’s Beyza here. I’m a high schoolstudent. I study IT. So I know about coding,which is cool. I’m 17 and I’m an intern at Doga Schools, in the EU Projects department. I’m learning and working at the same time. My goal is to become a software engineer at Google.
No, it’s not impossible. It’s possible because i want it and I will study hard for it.
I love listening to stories about historical events, a person’s history, mysterious stories etc. I don’t know why but it’s exhilarating. I love learning and thinking about the things people tell me about. I love the internet because it allows you to search anything, you can learn everything. Even though I know there is a whole different world behind it. At school I understand that we haven’t seen even half of the real internet.
The internet and social media give you power that you will probably never have in real life. You’re who you want to be.
People only know your profile, not your real life. It gives you power but at the same time it weakens you because of what goes on in the social media. Users can address you in whichever way they wish, just as you can. You have to be careful because you can break someone’s heart and they can break your heart. Anyway, that’s not the point.
My point is your power, your VOICE.
If you have enough followers you can make all the people around the world hear your words. For example: you re-tweet someone’s tweet to show it to your followers, and they re-tweet it too. It’s snowballing. Every second it reaches out to more people. Even if you don’t want to. And some people use this. They create platforms to reach their goals, to reach your goals.
In my country, change.org is a very famous website which allows your voice to be heard. It works in a quite simple manner: you can start a petition and people will sign your petition if they find it to be reasonable. Your goal here is to reach a certain number of people. Your supporters and you share it with other people. It reaches out to a new crowd of people. You never meet them but they support your goal. They spread it to the world. And then it reaches out to the policymakers. They give their decision. It’s up to them: if they want to realise it, they will realise it. Sometimes you reach for your goal but sometimes people don’t sign your petition.
As I said before, internet gives you power. You can use your power in a bad way or in a good way. As an intern at Doga Schools, I learned about the WYRED Project. There are other projects in which Doga Schools are involved, but I think this is the most important one. Because young people really need someone to help them make their voices heard. There are young people who can speak to crowds, but the majority young people can’t even talk about their feelings or thoughts. This it the greatest part I think. I wish that the project reaches out to more young people so they can make their voices heard.
