Hey everyone, I'm moderately new to this site and let me say right off the bat: I can't express how thankful I am for a place like this and for people like you.
My name is Bruno. I was born in Brazil, but I am American - only the politicians seem to disagree.
I appreciate all of the information to email, fax, and call representatives and senators - it's a great idea, but we need to be working on more facets than one. Even if it's not a HUGE idea, I have an idea that I think could bloom subliminally (with a lot of help).
I was reading some reports from The New York Times online today, and it struck me, America is a conglomerate of consumerism - a living, breathing market run by consumer demand. In the same sense, so is the news. Newspapers will write about the things that we (as a large demographic) want them to write. It's all about sales and marketing!
So, if Immigration has been one of the key topics in American politics for a decade, why is it that most of the articles involving immigration can only be found deep within the newspaper as opposed to the front page (especially with a presidential election right around the corner.)
We need to stir things up. We need to let it be known that the immigrant demographic has grown and that we too are decision making consumers - even if we can't vote, we can decide what to watch on tv, and what not to watch. We can decide which product to buy and which to not buy. In a sense, we control a fraction of the country with a dollar bill. But to do this, we need a bigger voice - and to start, we need a big subliminal foundation.
With the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, we learned that websites archive their search history (Per every computer's IP address). Big websites like Google and Yahoo use this data to organize their search results. That is to say, that the likeliness of a website to appear in the first page of search results is based on the 'hits' it has received from an array of consumer searches. Like My Space videos for example. After you watch a video on My Space, the screen will go black and the media player will display a dozen other videos that you can watch - these videos are run by the same process - that is to say, they are advertised because those are the videos that have received the highest number of 'hits.'
Ahem.. anyhow, back to the main topic. In order to get consideration and support from media hungry consumers, we need to bring the topic to the forefront.
Every time you search for an article in a website (www.nytimes.com for example) your search gets saved in their database. It's their digital "What consumers want to read about" receipt.
Lets say we scourge the internet for every major news and media outlet we can find (whether it's a TV station, newspaper, magazine), post the links on this forum and ask all members (and anyone else who is in for the cause) to visit as many websites as possible and search for relevant things like "Immigration" "Dream Act" "Alien Legalization" "Mexico Border Deaths."
Think, if 100 people each posted 5 searches on a small town newspaper's website, that's 500 hits for our relevant cause - enough to turn this small town's media source into an immigration information station.
And if we did the same thing to every newspaper website in a metropolis like L.A.? N.Y.? ABC? NBC? CBS? CNN?
What if we had 200 people? What if we searched for 10 relevant topics at each website?
Like I said earlier, most of us can't vote - therefore we cannot control the government. But we can control something even bigger, even stronger, and even more important: Commerce.
Let me know what you think and please keep in mind that this is not a plan out of which to expect instant gratification <Rome wasn't built in a day> but together with writing letters and emails to local, statewide, and national news sources (which I hope most of you are already doing), we have the power to be heard.
"You can't change the world, but you can make a dent." -Edward Norton (Death to Smoochy)
-Bruno
Even if it will help my friend's dog's sister's owner's great great grandson's step aunt Maria's godfather 100 years from now... it's still a worthwhile notion.
I'm not sure if I follow this exactly - but I think you definitely have something there On a very basic level - if Dream Act Portal shows up ahead of Alipac when you google "immigration " - you have a better opportunity to influence people. So if you "click" on related good sites when you do searches , it ups their visibility.
