Day of Silence -- April 17th

Day of Silence, GLSEN's annual awareness raising event, happens this week. The event encourages students (of all ages) to "take some form of a vow of silence to bring attention to the name-calling, bullying and harassment -- in effect, the silencing -- experienced by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) students and their allies." (From DayofSilence.org).

2009 will be my first year participating, and, a few days ago, I texted Jill Benavides (one of GLSEN Cincinnati's co-chairs) about possibly putting together an article on Day of Silence and social media, because god knows it'll be hard for me to go a full day without talking, let alone tweeting. But it seems that the Day of Silence blog beat me to the post:

On Friday the 17th
On the Day of Silence tweet about it as much as possible.

Important: If you are a student in middle or high school, make sure you only tweet during times that your school permits. Tweet in the morning before school starts, at lunch, and especially after school.

If you can’t tweet any other time, plan to tweet within one hour after classes end. We hope that will create a rolling, growing Twitter movement from the East to the West coast as schools close for the day. Students in Alaska and Hawaii, join in when you can. And if you live outside the U.S. you can be a part too.

Tweet topics
Tweet what you’re doing for DOS. Tweet how many students are participating at your school. Tweet the different ways you’re getting support. Tweet if you’re holding a Breaking the Silence event. Tweet about how many buttons you’re wearing. Tweet about the reactions of your classmates.

Basically, if it has to do with DOS, tweet it in the days leading up to Friday.

Tagging your tweets
Don’t forget to mention DOS (@dayofsilence) by using the “@” or “#” tags. For general Twitter info, click here. (Now you can use the “@dayofsilence” anywhere in your tweet, not just at the beginning.) More about this tag, click here.

Follow Friday
April 17th is a Friday, so you can also tag your tweets: #followfriday. That’s a great way to recommend to other Twitter users who to follow. Find out about Follow Friday here and here.

*wipes forehead* Thank god!!!! I can Twitter!

Checking out my schedule for the day, I think I can handle it. The DOS people are clear on this: participate when you can, how you can, and as best you can. So, for example, I have to work until 6am Friday morning -- that's ok, I can talk, because it's my job. I've been tapped to lead the finals review for my nursing class -- that's ok, I can talk, because other people are relying on me. Other than that, though, I'm quiet as a church mouth mouse and I'm twittering away fiercely all day! (Although I'm also going to exempt time for two other things: planning for that night's show and any sort of finals review that goes on, since it is the last day of class before finals week. You'll all understand, right?)

And, then, at the Oxford Drag Show, we break the silence!!! WHOO HOO!!! That's sounds like a pretty freakin' rockin' day!

I'm printing off my cards -- I'm shooting for 100 of them -- and I'll be adding my button here on this blog to show that I'll be participating. Get ready to have lots of twitter updates throughout the day (make sure you add the hashtag #dayofsilence to all of your tweets that day, and make sure you follow me, my coblogger Cody whom I am going to force to participate, and Day of Silence Twitter), and I'll have a blog post the next day with my experiences.

Who's with me on this?

Oh, and huge props out to the DOS people and GLSEN... you got it right! Not only is there a blog that we can follow (blogrolled now), but you've got a Twitter that's active -- including a suggested hashtag -- and you have buttons we can add to our blogs! That's what we call using social media for a good cause! Well done!!! I've always been a huge supporter of GLSEN and their work, but this really goes above and beyond.