Day 2: September 2, 2007

The second day started off with even more energy than the first as many people had the chance to mingle and get to know each other the previous evening over dinner. This was definitely my busiest day of the conference. I chose to attend the morning session on youth involvement in the media, which the First Lady herself even attended! This session interested me the most due to my interest in completing graduate degree in journalism in the future. The moderator was great as he opened the floor to hear the opinion of youth what youth thought about when they spoke of media. I was actually surprised that we were even discussing such issues as the media being biased, manipulative and brainwashing entity. We also discussed how the media is used to form our identities and how it influences change if people are well informed. The result of this session was that many youth in the room wanted to create a youth media network or some kind of monthly newspaper where youth could express themselves and have their voices heard. In my opinion, I thought the positive energy was all great, but my greatest criticism of such conferences is that such heavy issues are only discussed on a surface level. I thought having youth involved in media is great, but media outlets also had to change to promote more freedom and less government or corporate control. Independent and youth media outlets must be encouraged and promoted but more importantly citizens must have the freedom to criticize and hold corporations and their governments responsible for their wrong doings.

Following another elaborate lunch, the session I attended after lunch dealt with encouraging civic engagement and local connections among youth and in this session we gathered in small groups and were able to discuss such possibilities. As a member and student intern with TIG, I thought this would be a great opportunity to promote the online community of TIG and the local as well as global connections such an online community as TIG facilitates. I mentioned the example of Canada Local Connections (CLC) project TIG has launched and how such an effort to create local connections online will materialize offline to civic engagement and community involvement. Following this session, I had the privilege of being interviewed by someone planning to do a documentary on the conference and express my impression and opinions of the conference, which will hopefully be ready in one month. This followed by a walk for peace and planting of trees that was supposed to symbolize peace. By the end of such a busy day, everyone was exhausted from the conference and either returned to their hotels or Naama Bay to enjoy the night life of Sharm. I personally preferred option 2 :)