Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id SAA27885 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 24 May 2000 18:52:46 +0100 From: Robin Faichney <robin@faichney.demon.co.uk> Organization: Reborn Technology To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: this little meme went to market... Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 18:24:22 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: <20000524160433.19172.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-Id: <00052418341802.00485@faichney> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Wed, 24 May 2000, Paul marsden wrote:
>>In that article, Paul, you say you refused to work on an anti-smoking
>>campaign because you don't want to change the way people think. Do you see
>>a clear distinction between that and "mere" advertising, PR, etc? Or is it
>>a matter of degree? Are your personal feelings about such issues
>>necessarily involved, or not?
>
>I'm afraid the journo got the wrong end of the stick there - It was actually
>as a consequence of working for the development of a UK gov. anti-smoking
>campaign, using the mememaps to frame the communication and make it more
>compelling, that we decided to stick to pure commercial ventures in future.
>The reason for this, for me at least, is that in the context of commercial
>communication, people expect information to attempt to deliberately
>manipulate their perceptions and influence their behaviour; its what
>marketing is all about, there's a perverse democracy about it, becasue
>everybody's doing it: It's all about money and the rest is conversation. On
>the other hand I felt that our crude attempt at ideational eugenics -
>deliberately targeting political messages with political authority at lower
>socio-economic groups - left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. The
>distinction between commercial and political campaigns is probably
>artificial I know....
I don't know. On one hand there is a selfish aspiration towards good old
material gain, on the other the whole nanny vs. caring state thing and the
contorted philosophy and psychology of ideologues of any stripe. It seems
obvious which is going to be easiest to deal with.
Good answer, thanks.
-- Robin Faichney===============================This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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