As readers of the blog have noticed, this is primarily an apolitical blog. I’m linking to an article in the Utne Reader by Joseph Hart. I realize linking to an Utne article may give you some insight into my political preference. The article provides interesting insight into the problems of modern protest. From a communication or messaging perspective, there are two points of interest here:
1. Novelty vs. Redundancy, and
2. Grounding a message in the “here and now phenomenon”
Novelty vs. Redundancy
Effective, engaging communication balances novelty (something new or creative) with redundancy (something known or familiar). Communication has the power to engage, organize and reduce entropy and chaos. Novelty keeps a message, idea, symbol system fresh, vibrant and relevant. However, if it is too novel it will go over the heads of the desired audience segment and not chain-out. If it is too redundant, it is stale, old, and boring.
Not everyone has the same baseline or tastes, so the balance is not a simple recipe, but we know that you need to keep both in mind and in balance. In the case of protest movements, the creative/novel forms of civil disobedience from Henry David Thoreau, to Gahndi, to the anti-War movement in the 1960s, there was a level of novelty, rooted in the redundant (civil disobedience). It seems that most protests, that of the signs and badly rhyming counting chants (one, two, three, four, we can’t remember what we’re here for…five, six, seven, eight, no one really wants to participate) variety have been in arrested development for over forty years.
Hart points to new, creative/novel, ways in which protest messages may be shared in hopes of not being turned off or tuned out. One example is Ji Lee’s Bubble Project. According to Hart:
One example of a successful anticorporate campaign is the Bubble Project launched in 2002 when Ji Lee, a thirtysomething New York ad man fed up with his trade, printed thousands of stickers shaped like blank cartoon bubbles and then slapped them on posters and billboards around the city -- an open invitation for passers-by to fill in the blank.
The results, documented in Lee's book Talk Back (Mark Batty, 2006), were hilarious, subversive, and encouraged participation. Now there are bubble commentaries around the world, ranging from the political (a grinning model on
an insurance company billboard asks, "Why doesn't the government insure our health?") to the absurd (the Starbucks mermaid asks, "Have you seen my nipples?"). Although he has been fined a few times for vandalism, Lee isn't a revolutionary -- he's simply trying to "transform the corporate monologue into a public dialogue," he says.
In the case of protests and civil disobedience, the form of sign and chant, usually by hippies is not novel, it is not grounded in the here-and-now. Dirty hippies are not nearly as attractive in post free-love, electric Kool-Aid acid test kind of world. We can tune out many protests simply based on their form and medium. Changing the medium to a more modern venue is one way to help keep a message grounded. I would say it is necessary, but not sufficient.
In essence, protests need to embrace the core, genesis ideas (such as change through civil disobedience), while at the same time keeping the messages fresh and relevant in today’s society. These concepts of novelty, redundancy, and grounding are law-like principles in communication. It would serve a communication strategist or branding professional well to understand these concepts.
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