Sep 09
1
How Do You Get People To Change Course?
How do you motivate people to change course?
Venture Capitalists will tell you that it is a waste of time trying to get people to change. Just invest in things that they are likely to do anyway. That is why understanding the trend is so important.
So if you look at what people are likely to do in the context of Climate Change, what are people actually doing?
To my way of thinking the answer is, “not a lot”.
There is a lot of hot air (no pun intended) generated by politicians about what could be done, but very little practical outcome from it other than that which satisfies the journalists that write about it. The public woke up for a brief moment a year or so ago and watched the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and then like the groundhog, went back to sleep for a bit, and remains so right now.
The fundamental problem is that, if the Climate Change scientists are right, things are in bad shape for the planet generally. I suspect that the reason is that most people, who are semi-sentient, are also pretty cynical when it comes to the news. They understand that the headlines are there to sell more newsprint – rather than to inform them. And they are more interested in gawking at the train wreck as it happens and afterwards than in figuring out what their role should be in preventing the train wreck from happening.
And the academics are no better.
There are the scientists who will tell you that global warming is not happening and that the planet has been getting colder for the last ten years. And of course some of the newspapers delight in presenting those stories and in telling us that not only is the jury not out, but that the majority of scientists don't agree with the reports from the UN.
The issue is of course much more complex than this. The issue is about Climate Change, not hotter or colder. The issue is that the climate is out of balance. And as a result of that we are starting to experience changing conditions.
Those conditions are going to make life untenable in some places, and that process has started. However most people seem to have decided that it is all too hard to actually change. So just keep on doing the same stuff and enjoy while you can.
Is that why so many people are spending so much time on line taking care of their Facebook pages and playing the dumb games that are available there? I tried one of them yesterday because Tom had raised the issue of the incredible growth of Farmville in a series of blogs over the last weekend. It doesn't matter which game I played, but what was remarkable were two things: first the fact that as a game the concept was right out of the 80's. Very basic graphics and a whole load of repetitive tasks with rewards to hook you in, and second, as you get hooked in, your resources dwindle and you get the opportunity to spend real money to build up your online supplies, or alternatively you are required to sign up to look at other stuff and receive spam from businesses legally in order to build up your online supplies.
What an utter load of bollocks!
I can not believe that people are wasting the huge amount of time that they clearly are playing this crap, when we have a planet that is sick and the prospect of the train going over the cliff.
Maybe the way to fix that problem is to build a game that has the same lowest common denominator trivial approach to the marketplace. Is that the way to get people to change?
Unfortunately I don't see a lot of hope for the human race if all it can do is to play silly games. Maybe that is the appropriate way for humanity to exit this planet – being totally irrelevant.