For the debate, I was part of the opposition team, which proposed the motion that “social media inhibited socio-political change”. After the debate, I can say that it had little to no effect on my perspective. Our team supported Dean’s perspective, and as a second speaker, I had to give a speech on a certain point and refute the arguments of the proposition team. My classmate Rishab and I both worked together as second speakers, I gave an argument, and he refuted the opposing team. It was certainly a hard motion to support since personally, I believe that social media does promote socio-political change. My argument was that in fact, social media inhibits socio-political change because it can spread a lot of misinformation, and therefore make people believe things that aren’t true. In addition, I also read the speeches of my teammates and further researched into their arguments to understand them better. I can say that after the debate I was fully familiar with my motion but that didn’t change my view at all. I was presented with a big challenge, to support a motion that I don’t believe in, and there’s definitely a difference when we back a certain argument that we are passionate and believe in, compared to supporting a motion because we have to.
The opposing team had a very strong and easy case to backup, and I can say that they deserved the win due to their arguments and their rebuttal of ours. Listening to the opposing team actually had an impact on what I believe about socio-political change. Although I had to back up the opposition team, as I mentioned before, I actually support the proposition and highly believe that social media is a very powerful tool that enables socio-political change. The arguments of the other team actually expanded my knowledge on the topic and gave some pretty good evidence on why it enables socio-political change. The biggest difference that I found notable between both perspectives was of course that Castell believed that social media actually enables socio-political change and Dean opposed it. One of the points from the opposition that I felt like pretty much made them take the victory was the argument that Dean’s perspective wasn’t valid since it had been written more than 10 years ago, where social media wasn’t as dominant as today.