GITC: Introduction

Glocal International Teen Conference (GITC) is an opportunity for teenagers to address the issues and overcome the challenges that they have faced in their daily lives. It is a platform for all teenagers from age 13 to 19 to learn, empower, and bring social impact through a participatory and interactive environment with their peers from all over the globe. It is a lifetime experience to connect with the influencing teenager and act for a positive change. 

The conference showcased the ideas, experiences, and stories of teenagers from different countries through a series of panel discussions and presentations. The three key issues of GITC are Entrepreneurship, Empowerment, and Socio-Perspective. This Year, the Glocal International Teen Conference is being organized virtually. 

Presenter for “Socio-Perspective Panel” at Wai Wai Glocal International Teen Conference, 2021

Mr. Rashedul Alam Sohan from Bangladesh presented his presentation on the “Socio-Perspective Panel” at Wai Wai Glocal International Teen Conference 2021.

Mr. Rashedul is an 18-year-old young dedicated youth and climate activist from Bangladesh.  His purpose is to make the world a better, safer, greener place to live. Living in the midst of tons of problems, he has learned that he can work on a lot of issues. He wants to bring about a revolutionary change in the world with love, empathy, and humanity.

Climate change, one of the burning concerns of this 21st century, always stresses him. Due to his enormous concerns about climate and plastic pollution, he has been advocating about it through various platforms. As a semi-professional public speaker, he has given speeches to a lot of places including his school, college, Olympiads, and so on in both his native language and English. Rashdeul is an award winner of the Regional Biology Olympiad and Regional Chemistry Olympiad.

Rashedul has discussed the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing social media, discussed how social media is affecting our socioeconomic lives, and suggested methods to use social media rather than be used by it. He presented an overview of Global internet use. He shared some thoughts to make the world a better place to live by working together.

Synopsis of Socio-Perspective Presentation

Have you ever felt like you were spending too much time using your mobile phone, browsing the internet or scrolling the news feed on Facebook, even though you have more important work to do, or assignments to complete? Why did this happen to you? Let’s find out together. 

Firstly, I will talk about society and social perspectives. Secondly, highlights the effects of social media in our life. 

Let me ask another question. “How often do you visit social sites? Do you think social sites have changed the way you live and think over the period?” Before 10 years how you used to think, how you think right now, is different together in a political area, sharing the common resources within the territory. Now, social perspective is the attitudes we have towards our society, and within society and society is not just the surroundings, but also everything else we have around us, people, culture, language, tradition, and so forth. And talking about the socio-economy is related to our content with the interaction of social and economic factors. 

Now, let’s move on to another question, “how socio-economic situations control our lives” and how we all together can make the world a better place for living?

I want to explain with an example; if you are starting a business, and you will take into consideration of your society, how they’re gonna regard this, how they’re gonna see the social perception actually build our life. They control our lives. So, as the Emergent Leader of this world. We have a responsibility to change the social perceptions of ours, and the people around us. We have a responsibility to make the world a better place for living, a safer place for living. Now, how we can do that, we can do that, being a good person. By educating ourselves by educating people around us, and so many things you can do to make the place a better place. 

Nowadays, social media is kind of embedded in our life. In short, social media changes the fabric of society. Now we think differently, react differently and take ourselves differently so there’s a lot of change regarding all these things, and it actually has some benefits also but social media has brought about a lot of novel problems in our society. Now it has impacted our lives a lot, it actually changed everything. 

According to a HootSuite survey;  social media have become an indispensable part of everyday life for people all over the world. More than 4.5 billion people are using the internet. While social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark. And the number is rising dramatically. Nearly 60.1 percent of the world’s population is already online, and the latest trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year.

Mostly we use internet social media like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and some other social media sites. Social media is impacting our lives and there are some advantages as well. By connecting with social media sites, we can reduce social distances as we can connect with our friends, family and message them for free, and most importantly we can find some better opportunities as well. And people from different cultural backgrounds and perspectives also can spread love and positivity. Together we can do something great, we can connect with people, those who are smart are positive about the environment, and there are so many things that we can do with our social media. 

Advantages of Social Media 

• Finding likely–minded people
• Reducing social distances
• Better opportunities
• Connecting with people from different culture, background and perspective
• Spreading love and positivity

Power of Social Media

• Spreading messages
• Manipulation
• Unity
• Protests

The power of social media is unimaginable. We can spread a message faster than authentic news. So that’s a very bad thing for us. Governments can manipulate citizens and they can lead them in the wrong way. They can establish themselves directly by using social media, and we can also come together using social media. So there is so much to do with social media. For example, I want to talk about a project in 2018 in Bangladesh. We started a project regarding safe roads, and they connected in the social sites, and they started the project, which was actually appreciated by the whole world. They came to appreciate that we have done something great for society. Social media is a strong tool that can change society and the future.

A disadvantage of Social Media 

• Lack of inclusiveness  Polarization
• Bullying
• Vulnerability to adult and harmful  contents
• Time and creativity scarce due to  following the crowd and trends

Now, if we talk about the disadvantages of using social media, which is the lack of inclusiveness. Now, we are not actually open to inclusiveness, and we think we are always right. And that’s a bad thing happening in the world. Social disclosure is not happening around us. We are now afraid of interacting with people, and that is causing a lot of problems. And if we talk about polarity to adults and harmful content, then you can see there are so many vulnerable things happening in social media. And the most important thing regarding ourselves, the teenager, is our lack of time and creativity. 

Effects on Mind

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Inadequacies
• Existential Crisis
• Living in a make-believe situation 

We can see the effect on our mind is a great thing. We are now more depressed than any generation ever in this world. We are more anxious than any generation because now we are living in a make-believe situation. We see great things on Facebook. We see people are living great lives. 

Attention

• More fragmented
• Focused on unnecessary things
• Teens are more prone to do so
• Actual issues are overlooked 

Attention is also a great thing. As young people, we have a great responsibility towards our society, we can change the society, it’s our time to make a difference in the world. We can actually focus on a certain thing, we are more fragmented. We see so many things on Facebook and we think life is just like that. And this is not true. And if I talk about focusing on necessary things, then this is one of the most important concerns in society now, we are concerned about our faith.

As teenagers, we have the greatest responsibility. Remember that if your next generation is coming to Facebook, give them some training, teach them how to differentiate authentic news and fraud news, and focus on a necessary thing rather than focusing on unimportant things. So these are the things we should do. If you can possibly deactivate, delete your Facebook account, read books, interact with your society, interact with people around you. Catch up with your friends, go out with your friends. Make the family closer, build the wrappers with your colleagues, there are so many things to do rather than scrolling the newsfeed on your Facebook. 

I hope the potential leaders would save the world and would make a difference. We will change society instead of being used by social sites, we will actually use social science. Teens are the potential leaders and savior of our mother planet. It’s a great pleasure for me to present my thoughts here. Thank you so much GITC!