The thinking animal: understanding our survival

By Franklin W. Liu

    Two authors, published 30 years apart, view their works as equally purposeful and provocative. The books – The Medium is the Message and The Tipping Point — offer a glimpse of a parallel challenge, exposing pop culture in startling social behavioral terms; leading us to think hard on the overt and the subtle influence altering our survival.

     Marshall H. McLuhan, (1911-1980) a Canadian futurist, philosopher and academic who authored many books on the threatening effect of burgeoning media technology. Alerting us to impending, striking changes in society, he coined a few memorable phrases in the 1960s like: “global village” and “the medium is the message.” 
     In his seminal 1962 book, “Gutenberg Galaxy,” released years before the existence of the Internet and The World Wide Web, McLuhan predicted that electronic mass media would someday engulf nations of disparate people, submerging everyone in a tsunami of instantaneous global communications. It would wash away traditional notions of national borders and politics, collapsing time and space as we know it.
     In this new Global Village, ordinary citizens would have to be more vigilant of governments and multi-national business corporations imposing  information-monopoly. The dire warning urges everyone to recognize the impending, wanton trample on our privacy rights and civil liberties. 
     In 1964, McLuhan said, “Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet, it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”   
     He further warns in Medium is the Message that historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and the most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities. Society heard McLuhan bark his watchdog message and embraced him as an intellectual celebrity.    
     Patterns of curious human activities, likewise, intrigues another Canadian author, Malcolm Gladwell, whose best seller is titled, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
     In the year 2000, Little Brown & Company published this book. It was expanded from a 1996 New Yorker article the author wrote as a staff writerworking there.
     Although Gladwell’s book examines societal fads and frenzies, he reaches for more. The book’s central thesis spotlights the unique element that can inexplicably jolt a stagnant, failing product and revitalize a trend, suddenly catapulting it into something everyone must have and must do.
     Gladwell advances the notion that human endeavors and ideas can spread just as viruses do. When this natural or social phenomenon arc into a “tipping point,” a transforming, dramatic moment, everything changes all at once.
     Gladwell claims that this unmistakable, pivoting moment is predictable. Yet, he fails to make the salient point that as science, it may be reliably and routinely engaged at will to steer the course of human event.
     Gladwell says that in society, some people can be considered Connectors. They are a group of individual messengers. In any field, they are the ones most people turn to for advice. It is the innate sociable character of these connectors/messengers that sparks action. Gladwell calls it “The Law of the Few.” It was a fancy tag line that fizzled without any pertinent revelation.
     He also talks about the Stickiness Factor, maintaining that consumers and TV viewers are cluttered by a mountain of sales information heaped upon us, making it difficult for us to remember much of it.
     Media Dynamics, a New York based research firm estimates that 254 different commercials are exposed to a consumer in any given day. Now TV networks, along with 50 cable channels, millions of websites on the Internet,countless news and specialty magazines, poster advertisement on buses, in trains, in subway trolleys and on taxicabs roaming the city barraging us. These ads overwhelm us, therefore none of it sticks.
     Gladwell then goes into some details on “Sesame Street” and “Blue’s Clue” as two examples of interactive children’s programs that successfully managed to transcend the Stickiness Factor. Show producers had keenly analyzed and discovered children’s surprisingly peculiar viewing habits.
     One of the most interesting passages in the book dealt with examining what qualities make a network news broadcaster persuasive to viewers.
     Brian Mullen of Syracuse University leading a team of psychologists, conducted an experiment, studying the 1984 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.
     The study focuses on all three news anchors at CBS, ABC and NBC.   
     In particular, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw’s broadcast tapes were excerpted into 37 separate, nearly 3 seconds long, totally silent segments for viewing.
     A group of randomly selected viewers were then asked to rate the facial expressions of each newscaster in each segment. The viewers had no idea what the experiment was about, as well as what the newscaster were talking about.
     Viewers were asked to score strictly on the emotional content of the newscaster’s expressions.
     The results were surprising: Dan Rather’s scores showed a perfectly neutral expression whether he was talking about Reagan or Mondale. Near identical, perfectly neutral score of 10.5 out of a total of 21 points was also assessed to Tom Brokaw.
     But the scores given to Peter Jennings were quite different. When talking about Mondale, Jennings scored an elevated 13.4 but when talking about Reagan, Jennings’ face unknowingly lit up so much that the score jumped dramatically to 17.44 out of 21 points.
     Compared to experiment-control segments where the tapes viewed were neither on Reagan nor on Mandale but on some other happy or sad topics, all three newscasters scored consistently, nearly the same.
     All things considered, researchers determined that Jennings exhibited a “significant and noticeable bias in facial expression” towards Reagan.
     Mullen further discovered that when he asked people around the country who regularly watched Peter Jennings on ABC network news broadcasts and found that far greater number had voted for Reagan than people who watched either Brokaw on NBC or watched Rather on CBS.
     Mullen repeated this experiment four years later when Michael Dukakis ran against George H. Bush and found Jennings had again shown a similar bias towards George H. Bush, leading more voters watching ABC to vote for the Republican candidate.
     In recent glowing, posthumous tributes lavished on Jennings, he was unfailingly regarded by almost everyone to exemplify the ultimate, fair and unbiased newscaster. He may have even thought so himself based upon his consistently higher Nielson ratings than anchors Brokaw and Rather received.
     Subtle messages embedded in communications are nearly impossible to detect. Nonetheless, they secure measurable, effective results; government and industry have noticed with interest.
      Socrates observed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And surely no one disputes that human beings dominate all living species on earth precisely because we are the superior thinking animals.
     As the study on Peter Jennings shows: What we see may not be all there is to it.
     Our species’ very survival may well depend on whether we are intelligent enough to recognize the tipping point of our destiny. It is encoded in the medium of the message we send to ourselves.