GLOBAL FEAR ECONOMY
I know all too well from doing publicity in charities that your two key tools are, unfortunately, fear and guilt. It's the way to maximise donations.
It's the same in advertising. Advertisers try to make their adverts/commercials SEEM all nice and cheery, but often the message is still fear and guilt. For example, an advert about how a certain baby food will make your baby bouncy and lively will invariably imply that you should buy their product if you care about your baby's wellbeing.
There's so much fear and guilt in current communication and it's almost like an unspoken international currency. While bankers juggle real economic numbers, advertisers and public figureheads jostle to see how much fearful cache they can (barely) legitimately inject into their arguments.
I think the problem is that societies are organised to allow experts to produce facts and non-experts to work out how to exploit them. For example, scientists produce boring, mundane science and advertisers work out how to twist their findings into something they can market.
Something needs to change. I think a good start would be more people going direct to the real expert sources. For example, if you want to really know if probiotic yoghurts are useful then go to Pubmed (home of the main published biomedical research) and you will find recent good research like this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20216564 that indicates that probiotics may not be as effective as advertisers claim.
With luck blogging will help give people increasingly direct contact/awareness with expertise. However blogging may instead finally blur the lines and make it harder to know who the real experts are, just as Wikipedia is beginning to massively undermine major qualitiy factual bookmakers. It seems very likely that the raw honesty of blogging etc will be got-at by the advertisers, just as it's often impossible to tell whether a hilarious clip on Youtube is actually just viral advertising. I myself am a publicity/PR chap and, like my colleagees, am thinking of ways to influence Twitter etc. It's my job.
We need to stay sharp and steer the ship in the right direction. Each and every one of us.
I know all too well from doing publicity in charities that your two key tools are, unfortunately, fear and guilt. It's the way to maximise donations.
It's the same in advertising. Advertisers try to make their adverts/commercials SEEM all nice and cheery, but often the message is still fear and guilt. For example, an advert about how a certain baby food will make your baby bouncy and lively will invariably imply that you should buy their product if you care about your baby's wellbeing.
There's so much fear and guilt in current communication and it's almost like an unspoken international currency. While bankers juggle real economic numbers, advertisers and public figureheads jostle to see how much fearful cache they can (barely) legitimately inject into their arguments.
I think the problem is that societies are organised to allow experts to produce facts and non-experts to work out how to exploit them. For example, scientists produce boring, mundane science and advertisers work out how to twist their findings into something they can market.
Something needs to change. I think a good start would be more people going direct to the real expert sources. For example, if you want to really know if probiotic yoghurts are useful then go to Pubmed (home of the main published biomedical research) and you will find recent good research like this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20216564 that indicates that probiotics may not be as effective as advertisers claim.
With luck blogging will help give people increasingly direct contact/awareness with expertise. However blogging may instead finally blur the lines and make it harder to know who the real experts are, just as Wikipedia is beginning to massively undermine major qualitiy factual bookmakers. It seems very likely that the raw honesty of blogging etc will be got-at by the advertisers, just as it's often impossible to tell whether a hilarious clip on Youtube is actually just viral advertising. I myself am a publicity/PR chap and, like my colleagees, am thinking of ways to influence Twitter etc. It's my job.
We need to stay sharp and steer the ship in the right direction. Each and every one of us.
sylvan:
thanks for this blog x