Youth Political Engagement, “Sar El Waet” with Marcell Ghanem.
“Sar El Waet” new program by the journalist Marcel Ghanem on MTV, on Thursday October 18 was the third episode, the guest was the Leader of the Marada Movement, Sleiman Franjieh. In this week’s episode, the topic was discussing the future our country “Lebanon” and where is it going to lead us. The special thing about this program is that it gives the chance for the youth to engage in the discussion through an application the audience have on their phones. The application is called “Lebanon Stat”, throughout the episode there are some questions that are asked and the audience vote, then the results are shown on the screens and upon them the discussion continues. The last part of the shows constitutes of a debate of six participants, three of the opposing side of the discussion and three participants who are with. Every participant has 1 minute to talk and view his or her point of view, then after the debate some other participants have the chance to deliver their thoughts and implement on the discussion furthermore. Each participant is a representative of a political party, who speaks the opinion of their party and discusses based on their background and side of understanding and representing an issue.
On this link you can watch the full episode.
Youth that are the most powerful part of the society for making a change were our targeted audience. In the event youth from all universities in Lebanon and political parties participate in the Tv program “Its About Time”, to make debates, express their ideas, and speaking their minds. Those young people are the hope for the country, they are thinking about the future of every individual in Lebanon including themselves, are aware of the corruption and trying to change the Lebanese political system.
We chose episode 3 of Marcel Ghanim’s show, we went to MTV at Nacckache, the permission to attend the show was taken from Fayrouz Touk the assistant producer of the show. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to use the program’s twitter account and tweet from it due to security policies and terms of the program, therefore, we tweeted from our own accounts and released two new hashtags “ #ItsAboutTimeForTheYouth “ and “ #TimeForYouthEngagement”.
Based on research and our readings, to introduce, the importance of using hashtags we used the reading by Ana Morais, “The ultimate guide to hashtags on Social Media”. In this post, Ana talks about the history of hashtags and why are hashtags useful. As Morais said, “Hashtags are a great technique to tag your content and make sure that it reaches your target audience. In a way, hashtags have become a way to filter social media buzz and gather the masses around topics of common interest”.
Hashtags helps us to interact with our audience across all platforms, in our project we chose to cover this event on Twitter through live tweeting throughout the episode that happened last Thursday.
Marcel Ghanem shortened in his Forefront of the program in his own words the voice of the Lebanese citizens. He directed his words to the Lebanese state that it is enough to disregard the Lebanese citizens, that want to live with dignity while our leaders are looking for a ministry from here and a management from there, a deal that lifts them degrees and a share that earns them a lot of money. In our country, the director is appointed by the minister and the leader of the sect, and even if he is wrong we cannot hold him accountable. Our unemployed youth have passed the exams to enter the state jobs, but sectarian stupidity keeps them in their homes at the rank of unemployed because we wanted to divide departments in the state and the jobs on the sects.
In this episode, the program proved that it focuses on solving the problem of Lebanese youth, and is about introducing young people into debate on the air.
“Lebanon Stat” is the application that the audience in general can vote from to interact in the program, not only audience in the show can vote but the audience at home can vote too when they download this application on their phones.
In the debate between the participants they talked about their individual point of view, based on their political background and who they are representing. The participants were all talking with a heart full of feelings because of what they’re dicussing, it is a big threat to their future.
We created a short video of the interaction of participants in the program and discussing the formation of the Lebanese Goverment and it’s future.
Twitter analytics.
Over the past 28 days, we recieved 1.1K impressions. We can notice that before posting about the episode, the impressions were very low nearly not found, but after the live tweeting the impressions increased in a very noticeable way as you can see in the graph.
The top tweet was the one with the hashtags we chose to use.
Those were the top tweets.
Before tweeting and using the hashtags the audience were not so active and interested, after posting the hashtag and the debate the range of audience increased and we can notice a variety in the number of audience and their age.
The latest tweets we posted got this rate of impressions in less than 30 minutes.
