ALS, also known as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is actually a progressive neuro-degenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord which can bring much discomfort to a person.
The ALS ice bucket challenge was meant to get normal people to understand and feel how it is to be diagnosed with such a disease, to help essentially raise awareness for this kind of disease and most importantly, help raise funds for people diagnosed with it.
In my opinion,i find such a campaign effective in raising awareness because if we solely look from the number of people who did this challenge alone, there are many of them and that will prove that it succeeded very well. The funds raised have also been of very high numbers. Currently, it has raised over a $100 million, which is quite an achievement considering how many have not heard of ALS before.
However, i also personally feel that this challenge, with its main aim of raising awareness for the disease,has failed to some extent. What sounded like a very meaningful and creative way to raise awareness ended up becoming something that most people now do it for fun, tagging and nominating their friends on social media platforms to do the challenge as well. It has gotten to the point that people are just doing the challenge for fun, to try to get more “LIKES” on their Facebook or Instagram or simply just trying to become more popular on social media platforms. Many celebrities have already completed the challenge, and although it is supposed to be meaningful and all and they too donated money, some may question about their motive in doing so. They may be doing so simply just to get more popular themselves. That alone, is enough to prove that the ALS ice bucket challenge has lost its purpose and ultimate motive already.
The media has definitely spearheaded this project and enabled it to be very successful, what started out from a few people ended up spreading to the entire world from every single continent, thereby showing the power of harnessing social media to get a message across.
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