Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

If you hold your latest iGizmo, then look over your shoulder for a moment and reflect on mediated communication, you should see a long line back to Gutenberg’s printing press.  That line in your mind’s eye reveals two changes.  First, media started as a source intensive operation that required a great deal of resource and effort to produce, largely to the benefit of that source; and then evolved into the widely distributed network of receiver oriented iGizmos.  Second, media devices began as tools for saving the past for the present and the future but have now evolved into nets that capture an eternal present.  There are huge persuasion implications in these two changes over the evolution of mediated communication.

The earlier forms of media clearly took a strong source orientation.  Very few people could create, own, or operate a printing press, then a telegraph line, then a radio or TV transmitter.  Because the device was so complicated and expensive, it naturally created this source orientation and most of us grew up seeing The Media as a small group of privileged people who possessed a huge megaphone in the public square whether for profit or policy.  But, note how quickly that source power was weakened through the widespread availability and cheapness of receiver oriented media devices, the networked personal computer.  Now, media are much more powerful for the receivers they connect rather than for that big megaphone in the public square they also own.

Let’s consider the persuasion implications of this evolution from a few source oriented devices to millions of receiver oriented devices.  I see two implications:  WATTage and the sense of time, past, present, and future.

While the concept of WATTage exists as something individuals possess, it is also useful as a big abstract concept that can be seen in the large population over longer periods of time.  Considered not as that specific here-and-now property of a specific person, but rather as that large abstract concept, large populations of people used WATTage differently with Gutenberg than they do with iGizmo.  In its purest type, the Gutenberg media tended to generate much higher WATTage in receivers because of the unique and specialized nature of the message Gutenberg Media delivered.  The Bible.  The Dialogues of Plato.  The Collected Works of Shakespeare.  Newton’s Principia Mathematica.  Messages like that demanded, and still demand, extremely high WATT processing and for long periods of time, and largely appealed to small samples within the larger population.

Today, iGizmos require receivers to generate WATT, but not Willingness and Ability to Think, but rather WATT as Willingness and Ability to Tap.  Again with my ubiquitous theft from Whitehead:  The less you have to think, the farther and faster you can go.  iGizmos deliver on Whitehead’s observation in aces and spades.  Just WATtap and you’re sending and receiving messages to your heart’s content . . . and even that cliché is revealing:  iGizmo is all heart and no head.  Realize it as a harmony with another smart observer’s cliché of the headless heart in do-gooder organizations aimed at saving the world because they care so much.  Paul Collier‘s observations about the Bottom Billion also holds for the iGizmo Network.

Just reflect a moment on that mediated device shift from Gutenberg to iGizmo, that flip from source orientation to receiver orientation.  Realize the WATTage change.  Media used to be a primary means for generating high WATT receivers.  Now, media in the iGizmo network elicits WATtap.  Think about that as a practical persuasion maven.  Hey, When In Doubt Take the Peripheral Route acquires even more fire and heat, smoke and mirrors, doesn’t it?

Now, that second implication:  Sense of time, past, present, and future.  Alfred Korzybski (famous for the “map is not the territory” or as I say, “eating the menu,” when I talk about some foodie fools) once observed that humans are the Time Binding form of life.  Humans have that exquisite sense of time as past, present, and future and can combine information with sense of time in fabulous, instructive, and entertaining ways.  Consider how people now bind time with mediated devices compared with the Gutenberg time binding effects.

Gutenberg media bind the past to the present and future.  It took what we once experienced or learned, and made that accessible for every moment of the present which also means for every moment of the future.  With a book, I can always enjoy Shakespeare right now or I can always study Newton right now and anytime in the future, too.  And, this Time Binding of the past, also directly supports and encourages looking to and thinking about the future:  Newton’s past implies future possibilities that anyone can pursue.  Without the Gutenberg time binding, we’d have to reinvent Newton’s knowledge every generation.  But with Gutenberg time binding we not only preserve the past, but stimulate and guide future thought and action.

By contrast, the iGizmo network binds a vast present.  I’m here.  Where are you?  I’m watching this.  What are you watching?  Didja see this link?  Got a coupon that’s good for lunch.  Like this.  Like that.  Tweet.  Tweet.  The iNet connects everyone to everyone else in real time with messages that are only meaningful in that one instant of the Present and afterward are nothing but a digital DNA smear saved for eternity on some Google server or until a new file format comes along and washes away all traces of that past Present, bit by bit.

No one binds these Presents into any kind of book that preserves the Past as a stimulus and guide to either a new Present or a distant Future.  It’s just a cache of life’s continual To Doing List that attracts only Internet anthropologists who think they can find science in social debris, symbolic vapor, or network flotsam.  There is no There, There; just a Was, once an Instant Is.

The persuasion implication here screams: It’s all about Me!  And, that makes our first Rule, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid even more compelling, obvious, and easy.  Offer any persuasion play with a relentless focus on Me! especially the Little Me, the Instant Me, the WATtap Me, and you as persuasion maven are shooting fish in a barrel, taking candy from babies, and having children named after you – Handsome Stranger.

Now some jots and tittles, ifs and buts.  Sure, I’m wildly overgeneralizing with concepts like WATT and time, stretching and shaping them like globs of glowing hot glass into fragile creations of my own meaning.  Of course, you could generate counter-examples of genuine High WATthinking with your Android smartphone.  Certainly, there are many instances, maybe even instantiations, of iGizmos time binding like a Gutenberg printing press.  Yeah.  You could do that and if you do, please send me the link and I’d like to consider your Argument.

But, hold onto my sense of WATtap and Present Me, then run them through your persuasion efforts.  How do you move with millions of iNet WATtappers?  How do you break through their Present Me when you want to sell or promote or advocate an Eternal Message or a Big Change Message?  Hey, how do you use Present Me to then transition them to Eternal Me?  Or the Eternal Us?  Or just a Group Bigger Than One Me?

Don’t get distracted by the This Changes Everything hype with the iNet.  It’s just another mediated communication network, just like the one Gutenberg invented.  Sure, there are big differences, but keep the similiarities.  Hey, human nature hasn’t changed.  And, human nature is now responding to the iNet as a situational factor that influences thinking, feeling, and behaving.  And, the iNet primarily affects Time Binding and WATtapping.