TV Drama Can Be More Persuasive Than News Program
A fictional television drama may be more effective in persuading young women to use birth control than a news-format program on the same issue, according to a new study.
Researchers found that college-age women who viewed a televised drama about a teen pregnancy felt more vulnerable two weeks after watching the show, and this led to more support for using birth control.
However, those who watched a news program detailing the difficulties caused by teen pregnancies were unmoved, and had no change in their intentions to use birth control.
The results show the power that narratives like TV shows can have in influencing people, said Emily Moyer-Gusé, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.
“A message that is hidden inside of a story may overcome some of the resistance people have to being told how to behave,” Moyer-Gusé said.
“The impact that dramatized stories have on people’s beliefs and intentions depends a lot on the individual viewers, and not just the message – but our results suggest the effect can be there.” (more…)
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Darwin’s Evolution Under Attack: Top Stories of the Year
Paris - La Grande Galerie de l'Evolution - 2007 (Etienne Cazin CC)
Evolution is under attack across the U.S. Last year, the teaching of evolution was challenged in scores of schools. During the same period, six states introduced (and Louisiana passed) “academic freedom laws” that discredit evolution and smuggle creationist teachings into the classroom. (For more, see http://ncseweb.org/evolution/education/academic-freedom).
2009 doesn’t look much better. Oklahoma is first to bat with a strong antievolution bill, followed by Mississippi with a bill requiring warning labels on textbooks. Other states that may consider similar legislation in 2009 include Michigan, Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, and South Carolina.
Creationists are also undermining the teaching of evolution by sabotaging state science standards, with a battle currently raging among the members of the Texas state board of education. And in too many classrooms around the country, due to local pressure, their own misconceptions, or a lack of training, teachers are not teaching evolution. (more…)
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It’s The Network: Social Engineering in the Network Setting
A team of computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania investigating the political, social and economic struggle between individual self-interest and the need to build a consensus have learned that, depending only on the structure of the network of participants, they can engineer surprising experimental results.
For example, depending solely on the ability of individuals to interact in a network, as well as the number of connections they have to other participants and other structural properties, there are networks that generate the global adoption of minority viewpoints. In addition, the team demonstrated, individuals with extreme behaviors, or a greater awareness of the incentives of others, may actually improve the collective performance of the group. Put simply, stubbornness or extremism may pay off when it comes to social welfare. (more…)
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The Geopolitics of Cyberspace
by Blake Harris
My initial article on Internet culture published in Infobahn magazine.
Even many of those who have never read William Gibson now
know that he was first to coin the word “cyberspace” in his
science fiction story Burning Chrome and again in his novel
Neuromancer. Originally, cyberspace referred to a
hallucinatory virtual reality generated by a dense matrix of
computer networks. Mercenary hackers jacked their nervous
systems directly into “the net” so they could overcome complex,
and sometimes lethal security measures to break into computer
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