ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: More Than Just Another Fad

PHOTO CREDITS: DAVID ROSENFIELD.

BY CAMILLA SOSA

While many charities attempt to raise awareness through good old fashioned donation jars and organized walks, the ALS organization stepped up their fundraising techniques and began one of the biggest social trends this year-The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The rules, as understood, are as followed: When nominated a person must film him or herself being engulfed by a bucket of ice water they’ve dumped over their head, only to challenge more people or donate a certain amount of money to the organization. Within a few weeks the challenge grasped everyone’s attention from little kids to celebrities to big time political figures as it blazed through every social media site. The ALS challenge seemed to have taken a whole new approach to raising awareness. Whether or not this new approach is beneficial is the matter of concern.

While scanning through what seemed like endless videos of people cringing, screaming laughing and often times mumbling or completely skipping over the key phrase “to support the ALS organization,” I became sickened by the whole concept. Here we are in one way or another privileged beings, turning supporting a condition into some kind of social trend. The motives were genuine but bound to get a little blurred. It became less about raising awareness and encouraging donations and more about who could outdo one another. Videos of celebrities showing off their bodies or bragging about the amount of money they were donating came off more narcissistic than charitable. It’s unfortunate that good deeds have to be advertised and recognized in order for people to want to get involved.

 All in all, the ALS organization did mean well with the creation of this social media campaign. When dealing with a society as superficial as ours there is a limited amount of ways to enact change, so they went about the issue in a manner that would persuade people to get involved. The success brought upon by the challenge is undeniable and can be attributed to the widespread use of social media. According to an article on Techcrunch.com, “ALSA.org [reported] that as of September 2nd, it [had] received $106 million in Ice Bucket donations from over 3 million donors.” Facts like these leave me torn between hating the idea of this whole thing and being amazed by how effective social media can be.

 Sadly, like anything that goes this viral, the Ice bucket challenge hype will die down and people will forget about ALS altogether. They’ll fail to realize that there are tons of other charities in desperate need of funding. That’s the problem with this type of fundraising- it makes good deeds a trend when ultimately it should be human instinct to help others suffering from unfortunate situations.