OK, so Malcolm Gladwell identifies three rules of social epidemics; I’ve blathered on and on about the Law of the Few, so it’s time to start talking about the Stickiness Factor. I’ll quote:
The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makesIn other words, some things stick, and some don’t, and (this is the tricky part) the content of the message is not the only thing that determines whether it sticks.
Frankly, this is where I find the book really fails. Mr. Gladwell writes totally fascinating stuff about Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. He talks about the ways in which the two shows totally broke with what we knew about children’s programming at their times, and the ways in which the two shows put a whole lot of effort into making their shows work for kids. He focuses on how the shows make kids watch actively, how to keep their interest over the hour (or week). In some sense, he’s measuring the stickiness of the message ‘keep watching this show!’ But both shows have other messages. Sesame Street (once upon a time) was about learning to read. The measure of the stickiness of that message is whether we learned to read, whether we got to kindergarten and first grade receptive, prepared, and ahead of the non-Sesame Street kids. Blue’s Clues is about learning to solve problems. Presumably, the measure of the stickiness of that message is whether the Blue’s Clues generation is good at problem-solving, whether they arrived in kindergarten receptive, prepared, and ahead of the non-cable-watching kids. He doesn’t address that at all.
Later, he refers to cigarette smoking as ‘sticky’ because it is physically addictive; he says we could perhaps stop the smoking ‘epidemic’ by making cigarettes less sticky, that is, less addictive. And, of course, he’s right about nicotine, but how is that kind of stickiness what he talks about in the quote above? And, in fact, throughout the book he elides the message itself with the way the message is presented, and that is the whole nub of the stickiness factor.
In my case, I am trying to figure out how to tip voter turnout. The message itself is just not very sticky. People don’t stay home from the polls because they don’t know that they can vote, or because they don’t know that there is an election (OK, they do in local elections, primaries, and the like, but not on November 2, 2004). Nor do people, on the whole, misunderstand the importance of their vote; they are aware that they would be drops on the mill, and don’t want to be drops on the mill. Nor are they, necessarily wrong in their distaste for their choices; it’s unlikely we can reveal the candidates to be the angels the pure-in-heart want to vote for.
On the other hand, people know that Coke rots your innards, that most of the movies they go to will stink, and that the Red Sox will break your heart. Heck, people knew three years from the end that Cheers was never, ever going to be funny any more, and we stuck with it. Things do stick. And voting is, after all, free, quick, and (except in California) easy, and is pretty clearly a Good Thing to Do. So how do we make the message stick?
I don’t know. Do y’all vote, Gentle Readers? Do your parents? Do your friends? Why? Why not? Who convinced you, and how? Who convinced them, and how?
I’m pretty sure the answer has nothing to do with rock stars in television ads. I’m pretty sure that the answer has nothing to do with television ads at all (although it might be fun to see if we could get all the sitcoms and dramas that week to put in a line about how their characters all vote and see what news that makes). I suspect the message will be spread person to person. But that just rules a few things out; it sure doesn’t tell us what to say and how to say it.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
If for no other reason, I vote to give myself the right to comment on politics in our country.
I have a suspicion that far to many people in this country do not take an active roll in our democracy, yet are the first to pitch in their 2 cents about how things should be done.
If you want to be heard, VOTE! If you don’t, please shut up and go back to your book about illuminati conspiracies.
By the way Vardibidian, I like your blog. Thanks for welcoming me to the discussion.
I vote because it makes me feel good. There’s a !zing! inside me that I get when I vote that’s hard to describe but unmistakable. It has to do, I think, with feeling like a part of things, feeling connected to 290 million Americans, and also feeling connected to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and so forth. It’s sure as hell “sticky” for me, but I have no idea how to pass that feeling on to someone else.
I think I got it from my parents, for whom political involvement is, I think, like breathing. Similarly, I cannot cross a union picket line. I don’t care what the issues are. I got this from them too (and from Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie and so forth).
I have to tell a favorite story here that perhaps sheds light on my background: During the Depression, you took any job you could get. My grandmother got a shot at a one-day job as a pollwatcher on Election Day. Trouble was, she had to work for the Republicans. The Republican precinct captain was the other pollwatcher, and he made her promise to vote Republican if she took the job. She took the job, figuring that she would vote for Roosevelt anyway, and how would he ever know? Except — when the precinct votes were counted, the precinct captain was the only one who had voted Republican….
I vote, and the reason I vote is because I am aware of what goes on in this country. I know the issues, and I keep up with what goes on on a variety of fronts (civil liberties, education, health care, etc.), and thus I know what a difference a different person could make in office. I have to do what I can to try to make sure the right people end up in office, and that includes voting.
The cause and effect for me was definitely knowledge leading to voting, not the other way around. I didn’t start voting until the 2000 election. Before then, I was vaguely aware of some of the issues, but never really payed attention. By that time I had started to pay attention, so I knew I needed to vote.
I think that one answer to turning out the vote is to get people to vote because they care, not simply to vote for the sake of voting. If we could help people to understand what’s at stake, they’d be more motivated to try to make a difference, and voting could be a simple outlet for that desire.
Wouldn’t this be easier if you all gave the same answer?
Seriously, thanks for the comments, I’m cogitatin’, and I’ll keep at it.
R.I.,
-V.
Do y’all vote, Gentle Readers? Do your parents? Do your friends? Why? Why not? Who convinced you, and how? Who convinced them, and how?
Yes, although I sometimes skip town meeting or primaries; yes (my Dad in fact just one Twon Supervisor) yes, as far as I know.
For myself I vote because I feel a duty, and obligation, and a habit. I am not comfortable rejecting a flawed-but-generally functioning system and therefore I think absenting myself from a vote is not particularly useful. If you don’t squawk, you aren’t heard. I will sometimes write in “Abstain” when I cannot decided or do not accept the above choices. Because we are all paper ballots hand counted up here, I know at least one person will read that.