The recent ALS ice bucket challenge trend of daring friends to pour ice and water over their head has hit SDSU, and with not only students partaking in it via social media but staff in multiple departments challenging each other, both money donations and awareness for the ALS disease has increased.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS for short, is the progressive loss of nerve function from the brain to the spinal cord, which ultimately leads to the patient’s death over time, according to the ALS association website, www.alsa.org. At any given time, roughly 30,000 Americans will have this disease, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

“I think it was very rewarding to make others aware of ALS and me personally to see the inclusion of everyone because it started with residents and worked its way up to staff, so it was nice to see the community form like that,” said brown hall director Sarah Hoffman, who completed the ice bucket challenge on Aug. 23, along with the rest of Residential Life staff. 

The ALS Association has raised over $100 million as of late Aug. – $99 million of which has been committed to go towards finding a cure for the disease, according to the ALS Association website. Money donations haven’t been the only purpose of this social media craze, according to Mass Communication assistant professor Rocky Dailey.

“I think it does just from fundraising alone; it has raised a tremendous amount of money. If nothing else it’s brought about awareness of the issue. The net effect I think is positive,” Dailey said. “The most important thing is that it’s raising funds to research the disease. It’s I think somewhat dismissed that the challenge is now raising awareness but there’s a lot of people who know someone who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and they know what they’re going through.” 

Alongside awareness, this challenge has brought together people for a cause that is nation wide and larger than an individual, which can be attributed to friends challenging each other via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

“I think it was very rewarding to make others aware of ALS and me personally to see the inclusion of everyone because it started with residents and worked its way up to staff, so it was nice to see the community form like that,” Hoffman said. “I think it brings up a lot of awareness about what ALS is and what it’s about, because I didn’t know what it was before the challenge and then I looked it up online. I think it’s nice to see people are making awareness for ALS.” 

From a social angle, being challenged and proceeding to call out other people to do the challenge has created a separate issue that is underlying in all the challenge videos. 

“[When I did the challenge in front of my class], we looked at the ALS challenge from a mass communication standpoint,” Dailey said. “I think if people take the time to research it a and realize what the point of the activity is, it makes more sense but one thing I think that gets lost is the social aspect, which is that if you’re not challenged to it you’re not popular enough to get challenged to do it, which can overshadow the campaign purpose of it.” 

Dailey believes that the overall effect is positive, however, and that if nothing else awareness of the disease is being brought to attention to everyone’s social media feed that it hits. 

Both Dailey and Hoffman said they would participate in the challenge again, granted a few specific conditions. Hoffman would do it again if more money were donated to the cause. 

“I would do it again but I would do it again in the same way by connecting some sort of educational aspect to it, and as long as people could understand more about the disease I would definitely do it again,” Dailey said.