Persuasion, Facebook & Memetic Diversity

By Dr. Ben Mack


More and more businesses, advertisers and academics are interested in how to target kids and young adults. Getting kids to watch an ad is tougher than it’s ever been. There are two critical ways that studying persuasion on Facebook will help. On the one hand, Facebook allows a captologic study of Social Networking and the environment where youngsters get served their ads today. We live in an era where the average 18-24 year-old ingests more ads via computer than via their TV. If we want to understand how to influence 18-24 year olds with advertisements, then we also need to know how they consume media and what elements influence their time online and the tools and toys they enjoy online.

On the other hand, Facebook allows persuasion experts from inside and outside academia to engage, broadening the category of influence we seek to better understand. By providing a public conduit to study and develop a Captologic approach to persuasion, a vocabulary disseminates, illuminating persuasion insights and techniques to an audience beyond academia. In the past, applied persuasion and academic persuasion rarely interacted. For instance, there were zero active academics in Michelle Fortin’s www.CopyWritersForum.com and only a couple applied persuasion experts tracking the work in captology. Today, we see 12 full-time applied persuasion experts as members of Stanford’s Captology class on Facebook Persuasion. However, these two silos of smarts aren’t interacting. The silo of academics in captology and the silo of non-academic persuasion experts are beginning to cross pollinate. However, while academic insights are being absorbed by entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial approaches to persuasion are not included in captology. Such an inclusion would require a cross between an anthropologist and an investigative journalist.

Captology is a tricky subject to nail down, an inter-disciplinary discourse covering rhetorical analysis, information ecology, media studies, anthropology and human-computer-interaction. Computers As Persuasive Technology is a broad subject. Compounded in the notion of persuasive technology is our ability to identify persuasion. State-of-the-art persuasion is often invisible to everybody but their implementer. We won’t often know when we are studying the highest order of persuasion being employed. Instead, we study public patterns of effective influence. Captology studies the applications and the users that reside within the media of Facebook. We can see the applications and we can study the traffic of consumers that move through the applications. What we don’t have access to is the presentations that got the funding required to capitalize the building of new applications.

New media will present the same problems that eluded academia. For instance, how will captology study the effect of collaboration in generating online trends? The academic approach to Media Studies covers the financing, distribution and consumption of old-media programming. However, not in a single Media Studies journal, nor in a single academic Advertising Research journal, have I found reference to DAS, the smallest corporation within Omnicom, the people that strategize how all the Omnicom companies can most profitably work together and collaborate. Where do you imagine the better strategists work: on the ads you see on TV or at a higher level? The moves you see on TV are for public consumption.

From a memetic perspective, the greatest threat to the survival of Captology is over-specialization. Evolution has shown us that isolated species that evolve a fit to a specific mirco-environment often don’t survive relative minor changes to their environment. Captology shows evidence of evolving away from both academia’s rhetorical analysis and academia’s advertising research, and even further away from influence as studied by practitioners of online persuasion. As the language of Captology becomes increasingly incompatible with other studies of influence, the insular effect may prove grave.

I propose the acronym CAPT be changed from computers as persuasion technology to computer-aided persuasion technology. This change not only mirrors the pre-existing Consumer Research acronym CATI, computer-aided telephone interviewing, but also more accurately reflects the concerns of this discipline, the use of computers for intentional persuasion. However, the current acronym works well from an information ecology perspective, aligning Captology with a McLuhanian media ecology perspective. From the current acronym it is easy to discuss computers as a mechanism contributing to the ongoing production of culture, but this reading of Captology doesn’t appear aligned with the work of the field.

On the one hand, the study of computers as persuasion technology can be read as suggesting the existence of non-persuasive technology, or at least technology whose existence is at times inconsequential. This precept is challengeable. Within academia, Mathematicians label The Butterfly Effect as describing the phenomenon of an unknown minute catalyst transforming a system from one ordering system into another that is scientifically notated using a radically different schematic. Outside academia, some New Age rhetors describe The Gaia Theory as Earth as a living organism in The Universe where all matter is energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, so nothing is outside of us and everything is an essential component. Both cosmographies challenge inconsequentiality.

On the other hand, the study of computers as persuasion technology can be read as the study of the affect of computer technology on culture. Some of the most suasive effects of computers happen in the absence of computers, more specifically, because populations don’t have equal access to appropriate computers. For instance, when rug manufacturers began programming their weaving machines, creating some of the earliest computers, mass production efficiencies brought down the average price of rugs in the late 19th Century. Weavers who wove their rugs by hand were persuaded to take less for their products than they had previously because buyers had less expensive alternatives produced by computer-aided technology. A comprehensive study of the impact of Computers As Persuasive Technology would include these ramifications, and brings us closer to general social studies.

At first glance, Computer-Aided Persuasive Technology may sound as though it were a subset of rhetorical analysis because Persuasion has traditionally fallen within academia’s Rhetorical Analysis. If this be the case, let’s pitch-in and buy Captology’s tombstone and inscribe the epitaph: “I told you I was sick.” Rhetorical analysis is like Latin, they both study dead languages. Sure, Latin is the study of the ancient dead while Rhetorical Analysis is the study of the recently dead. Dead? Yes, dead. Rhetorical Analysis is the study of extant texts, the corpses of live acts of persuasion. But dead in a biological way, also.

Rhetorical Analysis’ overspecialization has created an intellectual island that is drifting further and further away from mating with the most fertile ideas on persuasion. How can I assess the fertility of an idea? By how fast the meme is propagating. Media Studies includes coverage of popular ideas and constructs, also known as Pattern Integrities or Memeplexes. Rhetorical Analysis doesn’t appear to discern a difference between mimesis and memetics, nor distinguishing genetic mimicry from live mimicry, nor discerning mimicry from biological entrainment. If these dynamics are suasive, then unconsciously adopting physical gestures is systemically transformative, creating a form of dialectic on a biological level. In this case, simply using any computer, regardless of content, will affect our behavior, but persuasion doesn’t exist without intent. Just because gravity has an affect on me doesn’t make it persuasive.

An advantage Captology has over Rhetorical Analysis is in testing for what elements truly make something persuasive, confidently expanding the knowledge of persuasion through replicable quantitative research.. An advantage Captology has over many academic disciplines is the accessibility of testing. The fluid dynamic of online activity, allowing for not only more cost-effective testing than in any other medium, but for an environment where tests can be run without the need to label them as tests, thereby circumventing the need for human-test-subject approval. If Captology can leverage ongoing testing to create predictive constructs, then Captology has migrated itself from a soft science to a hard science.

I don’t mean to entirely dismiss Rhetorical Analysis. There are some very sharp tools to be found in Rhetorical Analysis, and Rhetorical Analysis has helped many academics construct persuasive arguments. However, the tools being created by non-academic teachings surely outshine attempts at applied Aristotlean rhetorical construction. Non-academic persuasive teachings tend to address a specific audience with a common persuasive goal. For instance Neal Strauss’ book The Game describes online communities set up to teach men how to persuade women to sleep with them. Another relatively large online community studying persuasion surrounds folks learning how to use computers as persuasive technology to aid their entrepreneurial efforts. Perhaps the largest group of online communities teaching forms of persuasion is activist sites seeking political change. Excluding the theories and tactics advanced by these groups would be like academic mathematicians excluding the developments of probability created around the analysis of mortality tables to aid in the pricing of insurance for the bright, wealthy men who took tea at Lloyds of London, back in the day. Insurance provided sustainability for small business owners which allowed for a redistribution of wealth that challenged the dominant elite of the time. The path to global sustainability may not be visible to us presently. Excluding contributors to our field because they aren’t like us will weaken the health of our field. For Captology to maximize its contribution to the field of persuasion, we must include the best and brightest ideas as quickly as possible.




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