The world is filled with images, words and numbers vying for our attention — we live in a global marketplace of ideas that is incredibly crowded, and a large part of our daily transactions are the invisible ones — where our attention is sold by big corporations like Google and Facebook.

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Yet, in the midst of this cacophony, some images stand out — some words resound across the world. There are numbers we don’t forget, and messages that make us stand still. And sometimes — instead of being manufactured by someone trying to sell us something, these moments come from activists with an important cause.  

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But what is it about these moments that makes them stand out -- and what exactly do Stanford activists have to do to make us care?

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This piece will revisit two activist groups at Stanford that changed campus conversation last year -- Who's Teaching Us? and Fossil Free Stanford, and try to understand why they were successful -- and what their success can teach us.

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