Persuasion

Radio er den nye radio

Du siger brugergeneret indhold og kollaborativ filtrering. Men inderst inde ved du det godt: Den digitale udviklings væsentligste frembringelse er radio på din iPod.

Jeg elsker podcast. Jeg har elsket podcast siden jeg, i 2005, havde en lang daglig bustur gennem Sydney, hvor jeg klyngede mig til min lille iPod Shuffle.

Særligt interaktivt eller teknisk revolutionerende er det ikke. Ja, det er faktisk oftest ren shovel-ware, hvor eksisterende indhold blot klemmes ud gennem endnu en kanal. Men det løser et indlysende problem: Der produceres strålende radio, og du har aldrig tid til at lytte koncentreret lørdag kl. 13. Og samtidig passer det som fod i hose til en brugskontekst som de fleste af os lever med: Transport. Her duer hverken læsning eller video – på din cykel er radio the shit.

Interessant nok er det langt hen ad vejen de samme programmer, jeg hører i dag som for fem år siden. Og her kommer en kort intro til et par af de langtidsholdbare.

Mennesker og Medier (DR, P1). Lasse Jensen er utrættelig i sin løbende analyse af det danske medielandskab. Han er bedst, når han giver sig lov til at tale selv og mindst interessant, når han fortaber sig i journalistik-specifikke diskussioner som kun the gentlemen of the press vist kan interessere sig for.
Kommunikationscast (selvstændig produktion). Når man tænker på, at de hverken har budget eller forretningsplan, så er Katrine Thielke og Mikkel Westerkams ugentlige Kommunikationscast et lille mirakel. Selv hvis man ikke tager denne kontekst i betragtning er det pretty damn imponerende. Thilke og Westerkam dækker kommunikationsbranchen og omkringliggende herreder med både viden og humor. Og de gør det uge efter uge.
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Movie Reviews (BBC, 5 Live). Jeg mindes, at den let elitære filmanmelder Kermode og hans mere prosaiske sidekick Mayo var endnu morsommere for nogle år siden, men de er stadig voldsomt underholdende. Kermodes holdninger er skarpslebne og leveres med overskud og energi. Når man har lyttet til de to herrer (og det kræver en indsats at hoppe med på deres mange indforståede temaer) virker mange P1-programmer pludselig som energiforladt plejehjemsradio.
Harddisken (DR, P1). På den ene side opfylder Harddisken et specifikt behov (danske teknologinyheder i radioen) ganske godt og tager sit tema fuldt ud seriøst. På den anden side har programmet periodevis været plaget af lange ufokuserede indslag som har syntes dikteret af formatet (programmet skal vare en time) snarere end indholdets relevans. Og så har der meget længe været kludder i filerne på iTunes, hvilket i kombination med iPhonen’s dårlige podcastunderstøttelse er ret belastende. Programmet jeg i princippet elsker – og som ofte er godt – men som af og til irriterer mig i praksis.
Skeptoid (selvstændig produktion, skeptoid.com). Brian Dunnings ugentlige angreb på pseudovidenskab, overtro og vandrehistorier. Her bliver man klogere, underholdt og til tider skræmt af hvor bizarre nogle menneskers verdensbilleder er.

Hvad hører du?

Strategisk kommunikation, dit navn er spil

Playful Persuasion: The Rhetorical Potential of Advergames, en artikel om computerspil i markedsføringssammenhæng som jeg har skrevet sammen med Sine Nørholm Just, er nu udgivet i tidsskriftet Nordicom Review. Den kan hentes som PDF.

I artiklen præsenterer vi en analytisk model for advergames og applicerer den på udvalgte eksemplarer fra Toms Chokolade, Dansk Retursystem, og Danske Bank.

Artiklens abstract lyder:

The use of video games for advertising purposes is persuasive communication which directly involves the recipient in the construction of an argument. This form is becoming increasingly common, and the present article explores the phenomenon of game-based advertising. We begin by discussing the increased reliance on participatory and digital rhetoric. We then proceed to examine game-based persuasion in light of rhetorical theory, and we propose an analytical model for such games which is applied to three sample games. The analytical model takes into account the degree to which the game makes a self-contained argument, the degree to which the product or service is integrated into the game, and whether the game goal and learning goal overlap. Finally, we discuss perspectives for the integration of communication studies and game studies.

Unrestrained animosity

I’ve just finished Richard Dawkins’ bestselling anti-religious The God Delusion. Entertaining for sure but in a sort of indulgent way since I pretty much found its premises about as hard to swallow as Italian ice cream on a sunny day. Having one’s own views intelligently and conveniently confirmed – hasn’t that sort of become the domain of podcasts these days?
Anyway, one interesting feature was the rhetorical effect of Dawkins’ outright anger. An example:

“I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity, which has dulled our objectivity.” (p253)

It is one of Dawkins’ points, of course, that religion deserves no particular respect and that its claims and concepts should be treated as critically as all other types of claims and concepts. Nevertheless, there is obviously spite here and while it can read as honesty it can also read as personal vendetta and thus, perhaps, seem dismissable out of hand to some. Anyway, it illustrates the interesting and complex rhetorical features of anger.

All in all, I recommend the book, but earlier work by Dawkins is more essential if you haven’t been there already.

BTW, the New York Times was somewhat sceptical while The Guardian‘s reviewer had a better time.

Reverse rhetorics

I’ve become acutely interested in argumentation in preparation for the course on Digital Rhetorics (Danish course website) I’ll be teaching next semester. On that note, I found the following quote quite interesting:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it. [emphasis added]

… not to say funny.

Thesis on advergaming (or whatever the term is)

This paper suggests advertisers should experiment with in-game advertising to gain skills that could become vital in the near future. It compiles, arranges and analyzes the existing body of academic and industry knowledge on advertising and product placement in computer game environments. The medium’s characteristics are compared to other channels’ in terms of their attractiveness to marketers, and the business environment is analyzed to offer recommendations on the relative advantages of in-game advertising. The paper also contains a brief historical review of in-game advertising, and descriptions of currently available and emerging advertising formats.

Download PDF and more

If it’s a small thing: Lie through your teeth

I was shopping for shoes recently. The salesman told me that the pair I was examining needed a special treatment before being used. I asked him if he could perform this treatment for me before I left the store, if I chose them. “Of course”, he said without flinching.

“OK then”, I said, “I’ll take them”.

We go the counter and he looks in the back room for the shoe treatment agent (or whatever it was). He comes back out with an apologetic look and says “sorry, we didn’t have the agent after all”. “No big deal”, I say and buy the shoes.

Then last week I went shopping for a washing machine (the horror!). The salesman gives us a wonderful performance, elegantly geared towards steering us towards the most expensive of his machines. The whole thing is a combination of personal anecdotes and daring signals of personal integrity (he went as far as to question whether we should by a new one at all – we might have our old one repaired – it would be more environment friendly – I thought he was brilliant). Anyway, before we made up our minds about which machine to get, I ask him if we can get the machine within one or two days. “Of course”, he says, “they’re all in stock”.

So we go home and think and having made up our minds I call the salesman and tell him we want the expensive model. He says: “Excellent choice. Let me just confirm that we can get it to you right away and get back to you”. He calls back in 10 minutes to inform me that delivery will unfortunately take eight days because the supplier is out of stock. “OK“, I say, “just get it to us as soon as possible”.

Here’s the principle: As long as the customer is contemplating a purchase, tell him that any small request can be met, even if it’s untrue or you simply have no idea. Once the customer has made his choice, informing him that the small auxiliary promises unfortunately cannot be kept is very unlikely to make him change his mind about the purchase itself.

The psychology of dough-nut salesmen

Sometimes – rarely – a book manages to forcefully alter the way you view your surroundings. For me, such books are almost always of the popular science variety. I recently, based on Thomas‘ sage advice, enjoyed Cialdini’s Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion in which the author entertainingly describes salesman’s (in the broadest sense) techniques to bend you to their will. I promise that this book will make you enjoy meeting salespeople more – even if understanding the principles (one of the interesting points of the book) does not make one immune to their dark powers.

I experienced the latter quite clearly in a recent trip to Tunesia. On our first day, a dough-nut salesman walked up to me and my 3-year old daughter offering his sugary wonders. I told him no thanks, but he was persistent and finally put a dough-nut in the hand of my daughter who promptly took a bite. He then asked for payment. To put it in terms suitable for this blog I instantly developed somewhat negative feelings towards our dough-nut friend. I told him that he had given away his dough-nut – and I didn’t pay him. He walked off and my daughter threw away the thing quite quickly. And at this point, the situation was: My daughter had had a bite of dough-nut and nobody had suffered any damage. So why did I still feel extremely annoyed: Because he had disregarded my clearly stated interest and used my daughter as part of the bargain, but also because he had made me violate the extremely strong reciprocity principle in human interaction. See Cialdini’s Chapter 2.

In a larger perspective the best of such books does the reader a great service by tying together phenomena that the brain formerly had to process individually. It collapses seemingly separate categories and thus makes room for more. They make you smart.

The triumphant return of… media studies

Okay, here’s an excerpt from a chapter I’m writing on the importance of how one chooses to conceptualize the “player”. I start (more or less) by pointing to the implications of various user/audience views in other fields. Here’s my draft take on the issue in media studies. Comments shall be welcome, here or by email. Continue reading The triumphant return of… media studies

The reliability of the Zahavis

Carrying on my interest in trust and signaling, I just finished reading Amotz and Avishag Zahavi’s “The Handicap Principle“.
Briefly, the handicap principle is the idea that to send a trustworthy signal one sometimes has to accept a handicap. Taking on this handicap proves to the receiver of the signal that the transmitted statement is true.
For instance, in order to convince a skeptical observer that you’re a world-class swimmer you may have to get wet. You could choose to just say it (“Seriously, I am a world-class swimmer”). But that signal would not be reliable.
Similarly, the Zahavis argue that the male peacock lugs around his beautiful tail (handicapping himself since he is more easily spotted, less agile etc.) in order to reliably signal to the female that he is made of strong genetic material. He could have “told” her in other ways, but the tail is an unfakable signal.

There’s a decent intro to the theory of honest signaling here.

Now, Geoffrey Miller, reviewing the book for Evolution and Human Behaviour said it well:

“Depending on your viewpoint, they [the Zahavis] act like (1) dangerous hyper-adaptationists even more extreme than Steven Jay Gould?s worst caricatures of Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, weaving just-so stories out of thin air, (2) harmlessly entertaining, pseudo-scientific fabulists in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, (3) classical Victorian natural historians (somehow displaced to contemporary Tel-Aviv University) using the same hypothetico-deductive methods as Darwin himself, or (4) ardent, creative biologists who, whatever one?s qualms about their methods and examples, deliver a revitalizing shock to animal communication theory, sexual selection theory, kinship theory, reciprocal altruism theory, and evolutionary psychology. “

Miller adds, as I would have done from the comfort of my layman’s armchair: “I favor this last judgment“.

Anyway, many aspects of the book are fascinating (as are the author’s regular jibes at colleagues who spend too much time arguing against the “obvious” using fancy mathematical models and too little time in the real world).
But two sections struck me as particularly interesting. My limited understanding of evolutionary biology had it that there are essentially two complementary explanations of cooperation among animals (discounting group selection theories that are frowned upon).
The first is kin selection (and the related idea of inclusive fitness). Here, the idea is that individuals should behave altruistically to the extent that other individuals share their genes (or to the extent that other individuals are likely to share your genes). And what-do-you-know? Parents often care about their offspring.

The second is reciprocal altruism. Here, the individual is expected to be altruistic to the extent that he or she expects this altruism to be reciprocated in the future. So, a vampire bat should share its meal with another bat if it believes that this other bat will reciprocate the favor. And Hallejujah! This seems to be the case.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the Zahavis consider both theories to be flawed. Kin selection, the Zahavis argue, is really just group selection among relatives. It may be true that an individual “would like” to increase its inclusive fitness, but wouldn’t it just be much better if your brother did the work instead of you? So, kin selection is vulnerable to social parasitism (the bane of group selection theories).
Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, seeks to explain something which does not really warrant such fancy models, the Zahavis feel. Many individuals gain prestige by performing altruistic acts, which increasestheir standing in the hierarchy, which increases their reproductive success. Altruism, then, is a signal of superiority – look!, I can share my food, that’s how strong a bird I am (marry me!).

Very interesting even if I don’t entirely know what to think.