I observed social media communication of and about politics in general and I realize that there’s a big gap between what kind of communication works well with many voters and what kind of communication highly educated content creators usually tend to use. There’s a lot of “communication in newspaper headline style”, making emotional points that feel intuitive for many and need an attention span of a few seconds. And then comes the fact checker, making a 3 minute video explaining why this headline-message has its flaws and what is problematic. When you are just scrolling with the current average attention span of 8,25 seconds (source: Microsoft study), you won’t even come to the overall message of video no 2 and it didn’t trigger any emotion causing you to react or share the content --> it won’t get spread and doesn’t reach many views. So if we want to change the recognition of EA topics not only in more intellectual circles, but in a broad public, we have to adapt to these communication styles and create content for this target group, as this is the majority of voters. I don’t want to say there shouldn’t also be deep dive content, I think best is to have content (perhaps even on different channels) adjusted to different audiences and different levels of knowledge of the concepts for a broad reach. How is this affecting the politicians? Public movements have an influence—and if a big enough group of voters is actively campaigning for certain actions, it puts pressure on the government. At some point, it is hard to ignore this. Ideally, we have action on the street and behind closed doors in parallel so the voices of the street deliver weight to the actions behind closed doors.
I observed social media communication of and about politics in general and I realize that there’s a big gap between what kind of communication works well with many voters and what kind of communication highly educated content creators usually tend to use.
There’s a lot of “communication in newspaper headline style”, making emotional points that feel intuitive for many and need an attention span of a few seconds. And then comes the fact checker, making a 3 minute video explaining why this headline-message has its flaws and what is problematic. When you are just scrolling with the current average attention span of 8,25 seconds (source: Microsoft study), you won’t even come to the overall message of video no 2 and it didn’t trigger any emotion causing you to react or share the content --> it won’t get spread and doesn’t reach many views.
So if we want to change the recognition of EA topics not only in more intellectual circles, but in a broad public, we have to adapt to these communication styles and create content for this target group, as this is the majority of voters. I don’t want to say there shouldn’t also be deep dive content, I think best is to have content (perhaps even on different channels) adjusted to different audiences and different levels of knowledge of the concepts for a broad reach.
How is this affecting the politicians? Public movements have an influence—and if a big enough group of voters is actively campaigning for certain actions, it puts pressure on the government. At some point, it is hard to ignore this. Ideally, we have action on the street and behind closed doors in parallel so the voices of the street deliver weight to the actions behind closed doors.