I’m a little late on this, but today is Blog Action Day, a day organized to raise awareness about this year’s topic of Poverty.
I don’t pretend to be expert on poverty by any means, so I’m not going to stay close to the topic. But I think it’s important to discuss how we can use the web in general to draw attention to important issues.
When Apture’s seeds were born in conversations at Stanford, we were largely inspired by the idea of generating empathy for social issues. People rarely seem to care about social issues on their own, and I believe it comes down to having a good storyteller to get you interested. Think about the teacher you might have had in high school, who took a dull topic like Chemistry and made it fascinating. It took charisma. It took richness. It took whatever that magic is that allows you to infect other people with why the topic you’re talking about is significant to you. I’d like to outline two reasons/ways I think Apture can improve communication of social issues in this way.
First, I think social problems often get trapped by redundancy. Campaigns use the same words and phrases over and over again, reducing the potency of these problems. Let me illustrate this with an example. Below are several calls to action for public social issues. Fill in the blanks with the first imperative verb (command) that comes to mind:
- _________ poverty.
- _________ Darfur.
- _________ climate change.
(don’t scroll beyond this point until you’ve guessed these words)
If you’re like me (and a few others I tried this on before I wrote this post), you knew immediately which words to use. Why? Because the associations in our minds are incredibly strong- a product of repetition in mainstream media, news articles, and clever online marketing campaigns. In my mind, the phrases are:
(to avoid cheating)
- Fight poverty.
- Save Darfur.
- Stop climate change.
In a sense, the fact that these phrases are memorable is good. These issues have gained recognition in mainstream U.S. culture. But how effective are they, really? When you hear these phrases, do you actually feel compelled to go do something about it?
The more a phrase is repeated, the less impact it ultimately seems to have. Yes, everyone knows that Darfur is a tremendous problem.. but the phrase “Save Darfur” feels more like a platitude now than a real call to action. I think Apture can be used to help change this.
Have you ever read about a catastrophic event online, say the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that hit parts of Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia? Such events are also described using redundant language, e.g. “the devastating impact,” or “the awful wreckage,” which describe but do not evoke. Good websites include some photos of wreckage, families on the ground, and maybe quoted interviews describing what the wave looked like, how the ground rumbled, and what was lost. If done well, the text can create an interesting story. But imagine if that same story allowed you to see and hear the wave riding in towards the coastline, feel the ground rumbling on the street in Indonesia, read a Wikipedia article about how Tsunamis are formed or what subduction plates were, and understand using interactive guides from the BBC. (read this article on blog.apture.com to see the extended links)
In a far more creative, out-there sense, I like to compare it to triggering mirror neurons in the field of neuroscience. To understand someone’s position and sympathize with them, you need to be able to mirror the feeling that someone else feels. Face to face contact makes this easy, but the distance and flatness of the web make it hard to produce online. Apture, used wisely, can help trigger those feelings.
With the rich links above, some might say you cross the line into sensationalism, which may be right at times. But why does storytelling have to end at the use of powerful words? I believe Apture can be used to create more sensory and contextual experiences around why these issues matter. And it’s just the beginning.
Now to the second thing I think Apture can do. I believe Apture can change the disconnected experience between reading an article on the web, and your ability to take action and do something about it.
Have you ever watched a compelling movie and felt speechless afterwards? The film Blood Diamond, about the diamond trading business and awful civil war in Sierra Leone, is a great example. The movie has an effect on you: the acting, the soundtrack, the story… At the very end as the credits roll, you’re left near speechless and more importantly: you want to do something about it, or learn more. But after an hour or so, we all know what happens: we go back to our lives. We’re back to thinking about our groceries, smog checks for our cars, or what we’re going to cook for dinner.
But what if there was an opportunity immediately after the movie to do something about it? What if there was a big button on the television screen to Donate to organizations helping recovering child soldiers, or to Learn More about the country’s history? Apture offers those possibilities, empowering people to present background topics, widgets, and media they care about to tell a more thought-provoking story. But most importantly, Apture offers those opportunities to learn or take action at exactly the right place & time, when people are most likely to want to do something about it.
The web is pretty flat overall.. but I believe all of us in the web community should be thinking about how we push the boundaries of communicating not only information and knowledge, but emotion and action. These thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg.
Today I also want to highlight several organizations using Apture to tell more compelling stories for the public good. The Center for Public Integrity has been using Apture to embed raw PDFs and podcasts for more in-depth investigative reporting, as has the Washington Post and ProPublica with their investigative reporting. The World Wildlife Fund is using Apture to enhance how they talk about endanged species, and Forest protection projects in Sumatra and around the world. These are just a few examples. I would love to see many, many more in the coming years to see how we can persuade and compel individuals with infectious action. And if you have any, please leave a comment here, or send us an email at contact AT apture DOT com. I would love to hear from you.
If you’re interested to do make a small difference today, Kiva.org is one of my favorite sites out there connecting the first world community with the needs of third world entrepreneurs.
