We all have so many cultural identities that most of the time we are not aware which one we are pulling out of the closet. The clothes we pick, the people we admire, the way of managing our duties at work – they could all be singled out as different identities we use to create a uniqueness of personality. Once we are ready to accept the different, even confronting values and behavioural patterns in ourselves, it is easy to accept all the unique treats coming from encountering different cultures and people.
By Danica Vlacic
‘United in diversity’ stands as both the underlying motto of the EU and modus operandi for day-to-day cooperation. These were the messages brought to us by Anna Gots, Financial Director of AEGEE, and Kathrin Renner, Vice President and External Relations Director from the same organisation, on the afternoon session of the ‘Croatia in the EU’ conference.
EU integration should be easy to communicate, they argued, conveniently recalling Pink Floyd’s lyrics “together we stand, divided we fall” – but in the era of digital media, the communication flow changes as we use different tools to deliver the message. Youngsters are more easily reached by social media, as speakers from the different youth organisations showed with examples of their own work.
Ekatarina Kuznetsova, Board member of European Youth Press moderated the presentation on four different information exchange platforms that use social media to reach their audiences.
“We have about 7000 followers on our Facebook page, and overall European Youth Press community counts about 50,000 journalists, so that’s quite a lot of people and most of them young. Picking from our panel speakers today, it looks like even in the undeveloped countries, like Macedonia, they are doing their best and I think it’s up to the youth to change the situation, even though it does sound quite idealistic.
“I really believe in social media and that’s what our presentation was for, just to show that we can do it together and EYP is hopefully helping people to do that with their projects,” Kuznetsova said.
EYP runs Orange magazine.
DG Enlargement says it is dedicated to helping youth become familiar with the process of EU integration, fostering their attention through social media.
“In reality we are facing youth skepticism towards EU integration in general,” said Claus Giering, head of information and communication at the European Commission’s directorate general on enlargement.
“Recent studies showed that 38 percent of youth citizens are in favor of further enlargement and already 52 percent against, and it’s even striking if you look at the bigger member states, at the old member states, like in Germany, only around 20 percent are still in favor of further integration.”
He added that they cannot really ‘promote’ enlargement but have to find a certain balance in presenting why they believe EU has certain added value.
Anke Schuster, DG Enlargement, presented all the channels used to reach the youngsters. The community they created on EU enlargement has 9000 likes on Facebook page and 4000 followers on Twitter.
In order to reach the final goal, Mr Giering concluded that conferences like ‘Croatia in the EU – Strengthening ties in youth cooperation’ is certainly a way, but that they have to think about more up-to-date methods and link traditional methods of communication with new forms.
