Arjun Singh...

All Nighters Before Early Morning Flights...

I am not particularly fond of early morning flights. I'm travelling to Whitehorse today, through Vancouver, and the flight from Kamloops leaves at 6am. Had quite a busy todo list - so here I am at 2:08am in the morning. Now I just got to really concentrate on the most necessary things I haven't packed yet. And hopefully I will get some sleep on the plane rides!

Very preliminary thoughts on a Kamloops dialogue on youth voter outreach messages

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I had the honour and pleasure of hosting 4 students from the Human Services Worker program at Thompson Rivers University. I, first, showed them several different youth voter messages and asked for their reactions to each. Then, we had a more open conversation prompted by a series of questions I asked them about voting, politics, trust, and change. While I have not yet analyzed the recording of the dialogue in any depth, a couple of the ideas and feelings expressed at the dialogue struck me. The first was that the participants were turned off by the negativity they perceived in political advertising, mainly because this negativity gets in the way of their attempt to learn about issues. The participants really wanted to find out about different issues that they might be able to support through their vote. The second was a sense of malaise they expressed about their lives compared to earlier generations. They were said they were almost afraid to take a holiday / down time for fear of missing out on a job offer. They seemed to be struggling with the "always on", multi channel elements of society.

This is the voter outreach ad shown that they found most effective. Reasons given for its effectiveness included the use of celebrities, the hook at the beginning, the individual reasons for voting, and the intensity at the end. There was some discussion about how the ad could be still as effective if it was made shorter.