So when I just stumbled across this interview over on WorldChanging with author Doug Rushkoff, in which he's asked about his recently-created course on "technologies of persuasion," my curiosity was piqued. Early in the interview, he takes issue with some popular ideas on what persuasion entails:
Seriously, I wouldn't want to use any tactic to get someone to take my course, or to do anything at all. Once a person has been cajoled, there's almost always a negative effect later on. Chairman Mao used to talk about this – how people can't be inspired to foist a revolution, but that it has to come from them. (Not that he lived or led true to this dictum.)
I get asked all the time, "how can we get people to be more this or more that?" Usually by Jewish groups looking to get kids to be more Jewish, progressive groups looking to get people to be more politically active (or at least to contribute money to the right PAC), or my editors asking me to get more people to buy my books. And I think the object of the game is to get out of the mindset of "getting people to do something" and instead just create a really nice, really open invitation.
The key to doing this, Rushkoff believes, comes in the form of connections:
My whole pitch on marketing and communications is for companies to stop creating mythologies and persuasion campaigns around the products that they're disconnected with, and to start getting involved in some aspect of the thing they're selling. [emphasis added]
It definitely has a larger focus on things like, say, marketing or politics than a broader, in-general How To Convince People About Stuff sort of persuasion, but I also believe there's room for some overlap here into "our" topics such as presentation of history outside the academy. As historians, we may not be selling a product in the conventional, give-us-money-we-give-you-stuff sense - though the universities may well be, given the rise of the student-as-customer mindset (which is a whole other rant anyway). But we are trying to get ideas across to others, and most of us at least aren't trying to limit that to a stagnant, preaching-to-the-choir sort of situation.
I'm not, at least, as someone who's studying public history, and also as someone who has his own portion of that vaguely ivorytowerian "why oh why don't people know anything about their history woe woe arrgh?"angst (which I'm sure I share with many of those who read this). Doing some looking around in order to find ways to reach audiences, or perhaps even create them, seems like something worth chasing to me. I'm normally allergic to marketing lingo, joking that people should need a license to use the word "paradigm" in a sentence, but this interview at least piqued my interest enough to try to
It's worthwhile for those two points I quote above, I believe: that you can't really make someone be interested in something (after all, as several of us discussed yesterday, the consumers' - and audience's - thoughts and beliefs will remain their own, beyond our feasible reach, unless they themselves decide otherwise), and that some kind of involvement and connection - doing and being instead of simply selling or pushing - is probably a better way to spark interest in others.
Great! It's all so clear now!
Well, aside from the implementation part. Yeah.
I definitely like and agree with the idea. The question of how we can do these things, of course, depends on as many separate variables as our interests and circumstances and projects may present. So I don't know. On the one hand, the advice may seem unnecessarily vague, especially if we're a little outside the box as historians. On the other hand, it's still useful for all its vagueness: blank checks can be fun!
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