Vuoden 2021 Uutisraivaaja-voittajista toisena esittäytyy Project Caverna.
Project Caverna is a set of actions that revolve around the need for media literacy due to the serious and increasingly complex problems generated by misinformation.
Our proposal includes three blocks: first, we will produce three short documentaries, playing with the narrative format, to approach concepts such as lies and their different strategies, the half-truths, and the philosophical problems behind the concept of ’truth’. Then we will run workshops for ninth graders at the Päivälehti Museum in Helsinki and Museum Center Vapriikki in Tampere. There we will project and analyze the documentaries and do an activity with the students about the problems of misinformation. We will also discuss what we can do to live with it in a healthy manner while being an active part of the solution, not the problem.
Finally, the documentaries and reflections from these workshops will be taken to Twitch, a streaming platform with great potential to reach the young public, in which we want to experiment with integrating new formats that are similar to live debates. In the streaming sessions, we will invite experts who have participated in the documentaries and the students of the workshops to contribute their vision.
Last but not least, all the material generated will be made available to teachers and interested parties through media education information banks, in the form of a complete media literacy workshop, including documentaries, activities for students, and interventions by experts.
In the video below, that we used in our presentation of the project to the jury, we tell a little more about Project Caverna.
The uncontrolled increase of fake news and the potential problem of a society that doesn’t believe in any content pose new challenges for society as a whole and for journalism in particular, but it also requires demanding work at a personal level to be critical and be awake. Supporting this individual work using diverse strategies and facilitating the task of the teachers is the ultimate goal of Project Caverna.
Behind the project, we are two people who, with a lot of coffee in between, have been reflecting on these problems and how to approach them in a creative way and create a project that will be of help. Tiiu Tiilikainen is a multidisciplinary person working as a graphic designer and a freelancer in media and marketing focusing on producing audiovisual content, while studying to be a Master of Arts in Valencia, Spain. Cristóbal Osete is a Spanish journalist and a video producer with over ten years of experience on his back, working as a photojournalist for Agencia EFE and other media. After his studies in philosophy, Cristóbal has focused on analyzing the social meaning of journalism in different contexts. The sum of all the concerns, worries, and ideas behind those coffees is Project Caverna. We are very honored to be one of the winners of the Uutisraivaaja contest and wanted to thank the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and all the people who have decided to support the project and allow us to carry it out.
In our two-headed team, we try to ask the right questions. For us, the process of this project is about just that: asking the right questions from the right people in the right format to try to reconstruct a reality that is becoming increasingly diffuse. Sounds crazy, right?
Well, here we are. And we need you with us!
You can find more information about the project and contact us to add your experience in: https://projectcaverna.com
Cristóbal Osete and Tiiu Tiilikainen, the Project Caverna team