I know I’m behind the 8-ball with this one. Golly, I got the email a whole six days ago now, but this is one of the more clever framing/designs I’ve seen for a mass email action to lobby politicians. It’s part of a campaign for environmental water flows to the Murray-Darling river system by The Wilderness Society.
I’d say it’s better executed (though not as active or daring!) than the similarly-themed Greenpeace banner-sized invoice delivery to BHP Billiton.
Source: secure.wilderness.org.au
‘An interesting fact about white people’ writes Lander, ‘is that they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through “awareness”’. Lander continues: ‘This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges. Because, the only challenge of raising awareness is people not being aware. In a worst-case scenario, if you fail someone doesn’t know about the problem. End of story.’
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
To test how expert opinion affects this debate, we constructed arguments for and against mandatory vaccination and matched them with fictional male experts, whose appearance (besuited and grey-haired, for example, or denim-shirted and bearded) and publication titles were designed to make them look as if they had distinct cultural perspectives. When the expert who was perceived as hierarchical and individualistic criticized the CDC recommendation, people who shared those values and who were already predisposed to see the vaccine as risky became even more intensely opposed to it. Likewise, when the expert perceived as egalitarian and communitarian defended the vaccine as safe, people with egalitarian values became even more supportive of it. Yet when we inverted the expert-argument pairings, attributing support for mandatory vaccination to the hierarchical expert and opposition to the egalitarian one, people shifted their positions and polarization disappeared.
Fixing the communications failure | Nature
Worth a read, especially if you consider yourself an activist/organiser/social change agent.
/via @owenpascoe
Source: nature.com
The Copenhagen Conference should be the last of its kind.
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The NGOs attending such events are largely wasting their time and resources, for their influence is not in numbers or utterances made during the sessions but in how they have stacked the national cards through campaigning back home, that took place years or months in advance. Yes have signs of mass public concern: people gathered in the streets, are important but they need the legitimacy of being popular expression, not just protests by foreign activists assembled for the purpose. In the case of the build up to COP15 the moment to send such a signal was not at Copenhagen itself but in New York, around the UN ‘Climate Summit’ held in September 2009.
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The jet-set climate-talks format generates episodic news bites but keeps ‘climate’ (or any other topic consigned to the UN other-world) as a subject whose progress must wait for the ‘next time’. So long as NGOs persist in supporting this model, it will survive.
Campaign Strategy Newsletter No. 56 - January 2010 - Epics Issue
I really appreciate this analysis. Always pretty good stuff from the campaign strategy newsletter, consider subscribing!
Source: mail.google.com
