Sierra Club’s youngest president and founder of Act Now Productions, Adam Werbach, has a few things to say about the power of media to affect change. At Green Festival today in San Francisco, he informed an audience of green-minded media makers and consumers of the theory behind the making of transformative media. We all know that media has extraordinary powers to alter how we think, and behave, so why not harness this power to foment positive changes. Werbach's talk was heavy on theory that is common-place in marketing trainings and university classrooms, but that doesn't mean that the theories weren't fascinating, informative, and ultimately useful for everyone who lives in the contemporary mediascape.
Sierra Club’s youngest president and founder of Act Now Productions, Adam Werbach, has a few things to say about the power of media to affect change. At Green Festival today in San Francisco, he informed an audience of green-minded media makers and consumers of the theories we can harness in the making of transformative media. We all know that media has extraordinary powers to alter how we think, and behave, so why not harness this power to foment positive changes? Werbach's talk was heavy on theory that is common-place in marketing trainings and university classrooms, but this doesn't mean that the theories weren't fascinating, informative, and ultimately useful for everyone who lives in the contemporary mediascape.
Werbach opened his talk by posing the question, ”Can we use media to actually move people?” His answer was overwhelmingly yes, and in the space of an hour, he illustrated the psychological theories that point toward this conclusion.
To begin to answer his opening question, Werbach mentioned that media is one of the most powerful effectors, impacting social values, and behaviors on the individual and community level. The typical American household has the television on for seven hours each day, and by the year 2010, 70% of Americans will have broadband internet in their homes. Given the ubiquity of media in the United States, it is not surprising that it is impactful.
Werebach outlined three theoretical concepts that speak to this overwhelming power of media: exemplification theory, priming, and cultivation theory. Exemplification theory works on the premise that media tells stories that stay in the collective consciousness. The stories have the power to cultivate certain events as triggering emotional, concrete, and vivid imagery that has the power, ultimately, to change how the public behaves or orients to a social issue. The media also prepares, or primes, consumers to accept a notion by activating a pre-existing mental model to get a message across. Cultivation theory hinges upon the power of characters in a narrative context to move people. Werbach cited the example of the popular radio soap opera in Ethiopia, Yeken Kignit, that through its popularity (45% of men and 47% of women in Ethiopia listened to the show) and compelling narrative moved people to alter their behavior. After the show aired for 2.5 years, the demand for contraceptives in the country skyrocketed 157%. This demand has been attributed to the show.
According to Werbach, for media to be impactful, it has to work both on the individual and through the social system. The most powerful media is not that which tells individuals how to behave but rather encourages individual agency and autonomous thinking. Media has a negative impact when it reduces autonomy, such as with the use of product placement, but has a positive impact when it encourages individual thought and participation.
He encouraged the progressive media makers in attendence at the Green Festival to consider the power of media to encourage the popular change in small, everyday behaviors that will in turn create a demand for new media. Fox is effective, he said, because it articulates the values of its viewers' culture. The implied challenge is to create progressive media that does the same.
