school work

Classes are back in full swing. I usually end up sharing some of my reading material with Alpine, whether he likes it or not... so in an effort to keep from bugging him to death, I'll just put it here. It's interesting stuff, especially when you really think about the big picture.

My reading comes from Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed, by Everett M. Rogers. In a nutshell, we are studying change, and how decisions are made to accept change by an individual or an organization. Most of this is based on communication, whether among friends, strangers or the media. This is the section on the diffusion of news events (pg 75-77):

"News diffusion investigations focus mainly on tracing the spread of spectacularly important news events such as the assassination of a U.S. president, or a Norwegian prime minister; the launch of Sputnik or the Challenger disaster; or some other major world news event, such as the September 11 terrorist attacks. At such times, all the mass media virtually crackle with the excitement of the news."

"What happens next, as the news reaches the public and spreads from individual to individual, is the main concern of news diffusion scholars. These investigations show how important radio, television, newspaper, and interpersonal channels are in diffusing the news event, and how quickly such diffusion occurs: very rapidly, Deutschmann and Danielson (1960) found."

"Salience is the degree to which a news event is perceived as important by individuals. What determines this salience of a news event? The media convey to their audience strong clues about the degree to which media professionals judge an event to have high news value: whether a news story is given bulletin status (that is, by interrupting regular broadcasts), whether it appears in bold headlines or at the top of a news show, and the length of broadcast time or news space allotted to the news story. Audience individuals evaluate the news story on the basis of whether it concerns someone of celebrity status, such as "Magic" Johnson, the U.S. President, or the pop, whether it affects them directly in some way, and whether it has local implications."

And then we go to page 84, where the author discusses Social Marketing:

"We can force people to adopt certain innovations. For example, city and state governments enforce laws requiring motorcycle helmet use, automobile seat belts, and driving under a certain speed limit. Cigarette smoking is not permitted on domestic airlines in the United States, nor in restaurants and other public places in the many cities that have adopted no-smoking ordinances. In these cases, society has imposed its will on individual behavior. Such coercion in forcing behavior change is understandable not popular with certain members of the public. A different approach to effecting the adoption of innovations that can improve health, raise literacy levels, and extend life expectancy is social marketing, the application of commercial marketing strategies to the diffusion of nonprofit products and services.

Social marketing was launched more than fifty years ago with the rhetorical question 'Why can't you sell brotherhood like you sell soap?' (Wiebe, 1952). In recent decades, the social marketing approach has been applied to energy conservation, smoking cessation, safer driving, decreasing infant mortality, HIV/AIDS prevention, family planning, preventing drug and alcohol abuse, anti-littering campaigns, and improving nutrition. Often social marketing campaigns seek to convince people to do something that may be unpleasant. For instance, many Americans wish to lose weight, stop smoking, exercises, and floss their teeth, but they do not engage in the health behaviors. The main applications of social marketing are to change behaviors in directions desired by individuals whose actions are impeded by inertia or other factors."


So... next time you watch the news, pay attention. Realize and understand that someone else is impressing on you their opinion on what is important news... and furthermore, what is actually news. Also, notice the difference in terminology dealing with social marketing. First, the author says that forcing people to adopt certain innovations isn't popular among some people, but another way to achieve this is through social marketing. Hmmm... isn't it really the same thing? It seems to me that social marketing is subjective... for infant mortality, anti-littering campaigns, etc, that's social marketing because you can't really argue against those issues. Motorcycle helmets, seat belt use and speed limits, however, are "forcing", because there is an alternative choice there. Isn't there an alternative choice with the other issues, too? Sure, nobody wants babies to die... but what about those people who die because they were driving too fast? What about those motorcyclists who become vegetables because they didn't wear a helmet? I'm not suggesting that we should force people to wear their seat belts, but they sure know how to sugar-coat it to make the "innovation" more likely to succeed.

Moral of the story: think for yourself, and take responsibility for your own self. Then, we wouldn't have to "force" you to do what's best for you... or change the wording a little so you don't realize that you are being forced.