A Sustainable Train of Thought

I’ve been exploring a variety of different topics outside of sustainability as a way of informing my work in this area. For instance, I’ve looked into Hernando de Soto’s work in Peru, talked with Nick Zambetti about ethics and philosophy as they relate to sustainability, looked at relationships between sustainability and Taoism, and considered the implications of rhetorical devices on sustainability. (It’s best that I discuss those concepts in their own entries.)

Today I was reading Cost Per Influence on http://www.corante.com, specifically:

What’s different with new media is simply that it’s not the number of impressions you make, but who you impress. In other words, instead of subscription counts, its the number of subscribers my subscribers have, discounted by the probability of my memes getting through. Cost Per Influence. my emphasis

I’ve looked into memes before outside of this thesis and have found the concept compelling and attractive for much the same reason I find rhetoric interesting: the construction of the argument or idea is a critical part of the communication process. While this article is concerned more with blogging and advertising effectiveness, the topic is just as relevant to the communication of ordinary ideas, not just advertising.

Another point that caught my eye:

Performance is a reader that decides to write about the original post.

In this case we’re talking about “stickiness” in a memetic sense—the attractiveness of a meme impacts how “contagious” it is and how long it will be carried by a host, which impacts the rate of transmission. As they’re using the concept with relationship to blogs, a “stickier” meme is one which will cause someone else to blog about the idea, not merely to read it and find it interesting—that is, they will find the idea so compelling that they take action. Of course this requires that this person is in a position to blog about the idea.

The relationship I can see to sustainability lies in the idea of “pressure points” and the concept of targeting specific areas/people/points which have potential to result in a larger effect than the action itself would initially seem to imply.

So if we’re talking about the stickiness of the ideas of sustainability, one component would involve making the ideas sticky, while a second component would involve targeting that sticky idea at influential people, which in this case means people who are in a position to further spread that idea.

The combination of these components would imply that either the idea is widely or universally attractive in its own right or that it can be altered to suit the target audience without changing the core value. The latter approach would imply a payload (such as a medicine) with different transmission methods: pill, capsule, liquid, spray, balm, aerosol, suppository, injection, sublingual, creme, powder, and so forth. As long as the core value is retained, the influential people targeted for maximal distribution can alter the idea to make it more palatable for their specific audiences.

As relating to my thesis, two points: the communication of the concept needs to be attractive or alterable with a core retained value (a payload), and transmission methods would target specific people or groups for maximum transmission (effectiveness). As I mentioned before, it comes down to having the idea itself be so compelling, or the packaging so compelling, that the recipient of the payload is compelled to pass it along. And ideally that person has a large sphere of influence and can affect (or infect) large numbers of people.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this type of person in The Tipping Point when he describes Connectors:

...there are people whose social circle is four or five times the size of other people’s. Sprinkled among every walk of life, in other words, are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.

In the internet world, the idea of a Connector is more literal (web links) but there are again some people who have more influence. For instance, those people who run popular blogs or websites.

In one sense, this directly translates into using the web as tool to leverage existing blogs such as TreeHugger or TriplePundit or WorldChanging.

In another sense, this means that I will need to develop a vetting process to determine who to target, or at least be picky. In some sense I already have done this on a broad scale (industry and consumers), but clearly I need to develop further granularity in each particular field. I don’t think I can develop a concept that is universally appealing, because different people have different motivations—a certain appeal that’s effective with one group may be immediately dismissed by another group.

Although this concept really isn’t new in terms of how I can communicate my thesis concepts, I think the distinction between a universally compelling idea and a core idea with multiple forms of transmission is particularly compelling, if not a little scary. For instance, Salon recently ran an interview with Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, a group of 30 million evangelical Christians who are concerned about global warming.

The Bible also says that humans have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing.” Some in your community interpret this as a license to exploit natural resources.

That is a deeply flawed interpretation. Dominion does not mean domination. It implies responsibility—to cultivate and care for the earth, not to sully it with bad environmental practices. The Bible also teaches us that Jesus Christ is not only redeeming his people, but also restoring God’s creation … we show our love for Jesus Christ by reaching out to and healing the spiritually lost and by conserving and renewing creation. Christ’s call to love nature is as simple as his call to love our neighbors as ourselves.

What specifically are you doing to get people involved in these issues?

We ask Christians to shape their personal lives in creation-friendly ways by practicing effective recycling, conserving resources, and experiencing the joy of contact with nature. We urge government to encourage fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, encourage sustainable use of natural resources, and provide for the proper care of wildlife and their natural habitats. There are still plenty who wonder, does advocating this agenda mean we have to become liberal weirdoes? And I say to them, certainly not. It’s in the scripture. Read the Bible.

This example of distinguishing between payload and enclosure raises some interesting questions, one of which is whether the means justifies the end. Does it matter how we achieve sustainability, just as long as we achieve it? Sustainability is about relationships and systems, which necessarily means considering the human social systems which exist within the sphere of environmental systems. Thus, I find it problematic to address one sphere while ignoring another sphere.

Where do I draw the line, then, with addressing different motivations? Do I appeal to all groups irrespective of their specific motivations and vehicles for activating that motivation? Or do I marginalize or ignore those nonessential groups? Or do I ignore the problem altogether and appeal to or motivate them on another, different basis?

I don’t have the answers at the moment, although my gut feeling is that looking at ethical aspects related to sustainability (yet another post) may provide guidance in this area. My sense is that it’s important to understand what motivations people have (what their pressure points are), and then make a cost-benefit decision whether it’s worth engaging particular motivations: is it worth my time and effort, in terms of return gained, to engage certain groups of people? And conversely, who are the particular people who I can utilize or activate for the greatest gain?