Symposium Review

There were 4 presentations at the symposium I went to. The first talked about the differences between men and women watching conference. It discussed what types of things they look for and care about and even how a speaker's title in the Church may decide how quickly people fall asleep. The funniest fact was that women pay more attention to the Young Men's Presidency than men do.


The second presenter talked about how the Deseret News covered the 1978 revelation of blacks being able to hold the priesthood. Honestly, this presentation was just read from her paper and she never even really looked up at her audience, so understand her fully due to mumbling, but I think the topic was very interesting.


The third presenter talked about board games in the Mormon society and how the difficultly standards of LDS board games can effect members. What does it say about a person if they don't do well in a board game? What about those crazy, obscure questions, are members supposed to know all the answers? I think the topic was interesting, but I feel like it's unfair to tear something apart like a wholesome board game. I think the Church just supports old-fashioned entertainment and that's why these games are sold in Church stores, and they teach gospel facts as well! Yes, some questions are really hard and obscure, but have you ever seen Jeopardy? I just don't think the Church is trying to say some big message by each individual game question.


The fourth presentation was given by Danny Duerden, who was actually my 211 TA two years ago, so that was funny. He presented on the Church's Mormon Messages site hosted on YouTube. This is a channel on YouTube where LDS conference talks and Mormon ads are uploaded and anyone can watch them. Danny focused on the fact that a small handful of them had gone "viral." Meaning that while some videos only had one or two thousand views, some had 700,000 or more. He tried to examine what makes some of these videos go viral and what keeps other from reaching that same view count. He concluded that the videos that weren’t LDS specific reached the highest counts. So people from other religions felt okay about watching the videos that were about common morals and standards, while they felt that same public could not relate to talks about the Temple or other LDS specific topics.