Yousman, Gender, Race, and Class in Media 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
Class Activities
Part VIII: Social Media, Virtual Community, Fandom, and Activism
Activity 1
Question of the Day
The question of the day is a fun and easy way to draw students into the topic of the
day’s class, get to know one another, take roll, or use as a discussion question for
an online class. Here are the questions for use in Part VIII.
1. What are the first two words that come to your mind to describe “Facebook?” How
does this affect how you present yourself on social media?
2. Do you participate in online forms of social protest or activism (changing your user
profile, using a hashtag, etc.)?
Activity 2
Become a Media Activist
1. Show students the poster, 20 Ways To Be a Media Activist, from the Media
Education Foundation.
Activity 3
Critical Viewing in Action: Google and the World Brain
1. Obtain a copy of Google and the World Brain from your campus library or from the
Media Education Foundation.
2. Depending on time and instructor preference, show the entire film or selected
sections to the class.
Activity 4
1. With the entire class, show students the Vox Article “A list of people accused of
sexual harassment, misconduct, or assault” located here.
Yousman, Gender, Race, and Class in Media 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
2. Break the class into five groups: Arts + Entertainment, Media, Politics, Business +
Tech, and Other. Have these students examine the accusations against each
grouping of individuals as laid out in the article.
Activity 5
1. This activity requires using Google Trends, a free, easy–to-use service from
Google that analyses search queries. The instructor should become familiar with the
site before doing this activity.
2. Using Google Trends, do a search of several hashtags that are featured in the
#GirlsLikeUs piece from Jackson, et al. Take note of when terms were trending,
where they were trending, and other related terms.
Activity 6
1. This activity requires the use of word clouds, a type of data visualization which is
used to visualize free form text with larger words representing more prominent terms
that appear and smaller words representing less frequently used words. There are a
number of free word cloud generators online; one suggested application is Wordle
which is available for Mac or Windows.
Yousman, Gender, Race, and Class in Media 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
5. This activity can be narrowed and customized: e.g., The instructor could have the
students use state of the union addresses from Presidents Bush, Obama, and
Trump.
Activity 7
1. With students in the class, go to the websites of the It Gets Better Project