{"id":1861,"date":"2004-03-09T22:11:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-10T03:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/09\/1861.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:24","slug":"tipping-the-vote-the-stickines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/09\/tipping-the-vote-the-stickines\/","title":{"rendered":"Tipping the Vote: The Stickiness Factor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

OK, so Malcolm Gladwell<\/a> 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 makes<\/blockquote>\nIn 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.\n

Frankly, this is where I find the book really fails. Mr. Gladwell writes totally fascinating stuff<\/a> about Sesame Street<\/a> and Blue’s Clues<\/a>. 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.\n

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.\n

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<\/a>, 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.\n

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?\n

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?\n

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.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, so Malcolm Gladwell identifies three rules of social epidemics; I\u2019ve blathered on and on about the Law of the Few, so it\u2019s time to start talking about the Stickiness Factor. I\u2019ll quote: The Stickiness Factor says that there are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16950,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861\/revisions\/16950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}