In the process of apprehending and communicating the inevitability of The Postscarcity Scenario; in assessing the implications of forging a new Capitalism++ economy; in architecting a 22nd-century-looking Pragmatic Virtual Marketplace that is most adaptable to Accelerating Change, that enables, empowers, and rewards the growing numbers of Users as Content (aka, Conversations as Content); while grappling with the emergence and rapidly expanding prevalence of Augmented Cognition — both Social/Cooperative and Technological/Bio-embedded — we are engaging in exercises to which the Global Warming communications challenge might pale in comparison. “Biting off more than we can chew” would be a masterpiece of understatement in describing the multi-front global institutional and structural transformation underway.
Caption: Eagles are way out of their depth dealing with white swans, let alone black ones. However, there are many important things we can learn from the experience of educating humans about Global Warming. The effort was not only to convey the urgency of global warming, but to Spur Changes to Human Behavior based upon logic and reason, given new, substantiated information. The Research Channel program The Science of Communication explores the complex interactions between information, knowledge, communication, and meme transmission that can induce beneficial new human behaviors. At about 18 minutes into this program, we gain some nice substantiating information about Attention. As an aside, I suspect that attention itself will be experienced as a kind of Final Scarce Resource in the later stages of the Postscarcity Scenario; perhaps still a century away in it’s most palpably inflective consequence. The screen captures below may make a useful accompaniment to the program, should you find it of sufficient interest to view. In the out-of-context context presented here, the final speaker can probably be skipped, unless you are in the business of presenting scientific findings to the media; in which case, DON’T MISS IT!
Arthur Lupia reminds us that attention and memory are pathetically limited. It’s about creating great moments within speeches — or any communication — which will be recalled by the hearer. What people remember is only a fragment of what you present; AND, it may not be what you want them to remember.
This slide contains an augmented social cognition participant’s Three Commandments:
“Because of the bottleneck of ATTENTION, people aren’t going to be paying attention much to what you have to say, and they’re not going to be able think much about what you have to say. So how do you get them to think about things? The idea is, it has to be really relevant to them.” - Arthur Lupia.
Why it drives us crazy to try to convince people of what is Data-Derived Common Sense:
“The fact that you have a title, the fact that you have previous accomplishments, that doesn’t guarantee credibility; credibility must be bestowed by an audience, and it’s based upon the things THEY want.” — Lupia Perceived Trustworthiness + Perceived Knowledgeability = Addressable Attention Potential
Thinking about “under what conditions will someone believe me” is very important, and we can’t take for granted that they will.
“If I have a target audience, why would they pay attention to me? Information transmission is trivial, anyone can do that. Trying to get people to THINK, to give them new beliefs and skills, that’s a different idea altogether. To get their attention, somehow you have to demonstrate to them that their current belief doesn’t work, in a way that affects them. How do you do that? You take down the level of abstraction; you make things real, you make them close, you make things personal. You’re always in a constant battle of attention. The bottleneck doesn’t change just because you have good ideas; and the competition for attention is ongoing. For you to win the battle of attention, it’s important to think about how [your listeners are] viewing things and what their capabilities are.” — Lupia Awesome slide by Molly Bentley, BBC America
While this post has nothing to do with Postscarcity, per se; the hope is that it will help us to better communicate why the Postscarcity Scenario matters, and what we as everyday people can and should do to attain the greatest benefits.
