"Have you ever wanted to call attention to events and people that have fallen out of mainstream media, such as the protests in Iran, the murder of reporters in Russia, or the deforestation in Brazil? DiorActive blends elements of cosplay, DIY construction, outdoor theater and research to recreate events and people with the ultimate goal of raising awareness and encouraging action."--Alexis TK, finalist in the Digital Open, an "opportunity" for teenagers to showcase their inventions.
Somehow, it just makes me reach for my revolver.
Awareness, in my view, is no different than advertising in that it means to persuade an audience to do something. In this case, it means pointing out a problem, instilling guilt that the audience isn't doing something, then asking for money so that other people can be paid to fix these problems. Sometimes, a token item, such as a wristband, T-shirt, or tote bag will be given that further advertises the problem. At the highest level, people are asked to eat expensive dinners, buy inessential products, such as perfume, or attend sporting or social events with the problem as the guest of honor. Giving money, wearing themed apparel, attending events or even simply viewing artworks depicting this problem serve to assuage what, in time becomes a free-floating sense of guilt, while freeing the audience from making difficult choices or making much of a change in their lifestyles by reassuring them that it's OK, the problems will be fixed, if not by the government, then by some NGO's or someone like that.
What Alexis proposes is something very much like a tableau vivant, a theatrical form that dates at least as far back as the Middle Ages. So far, she really hasn't invented anything, except to come up with the idea of chapters that would do this kind of thing in every large city, communicating via the Internet, and pooling all their ideas through wikipedias and CC-like licensing. What she's being given the prize for is having her heart in the right place: I'm sure if she was trying to 'save the world' through tableaux vivant of, say, Colonization (Bibles, Industry, and Prosperity) vs. Native Rule (Superstition, Primitivism, and Want), The Downfall of the Illuminati, or proving the 'bad science' of global warming, she'd never have reached the first level of competition. That she's a girl, and a pretty, blue-eyed blonde at that, also seems in order -- by including a token girl in the winners, they can always point to the fact that the competition isn't just for boys or geeks, but for all.
As clever as it may seem to have a tableau vivant of emergency shelters in Africa, women grieving dead children, the aftereffects of a tsunami, they all share the qualities of a Christmas pageant: no matter how great you are in costuming, makeup and special effects, what you're actually trying to depict -- the grimy, smelly, noisy, sordid reality of a 14-year-old peasant girl forced to give birth in a stable, with blood and shit and amniotic fluid, to the Son of God-- is going to be miles away from what you'll finally end out with -- a 20-year-old Mary with perfect teeth and well-nourished length of bone, who moans "Ouch!" and holds her tum while lights fade to black before stagehands turn on a small light bulb in the manger and Mary, kneeling, ditches a well-placed pillow. What the traffic will bear is another thought: launching a 'virtual sweatshop' outside a Wal-Mart (about an hour before the police are called) may have its satisfactions, but more people will stop and gawk at a tableau of The Death of Michael Jackson or Britney Spears's latest antics than some short brown people having a bad day in that country with the funny name where that model gave away CARE packages. Listen, if people won't watch news on TV, don't like newspapers except as an ad hoc puppy toilet, and would rather have a good friend forward a news story now and then rather than wade through a news site, they're just not going to be interested.
Awareness is just like trying to make love to an elephant: you can't make love to an elephant, nor can you make love with an elephant. You can make love at an elephant, and hope she notices.
There may be glitches in the system, but microloans (which connect individual donors with individual recipients) and distributed computing (which tries to solve big problems with lots of computing muscle) are far more powerful than trying to tell people "Put $20 in our hat, and maybe things will go smoother."
I'm not a huge fan of "sustainable solutions", since they often call for child labor and keeping people at the level of subsistence agriculture simply to keep them alive, but not thriving, but I would welcome anyone who could make old-school phone receivers into guitar pick-ups rather than yet another way to make white suburban females into more-eligible Ivy League college freshmeat. I rest my case.