‘Fake News’ is today’s ‘Prop-agenda’

‘A brief, inexpensive and scaleable intervention’ was how a recent study was hailed a success in significantly changing (notoriously difficult) teenager eating habits in the USA. Undertaken by Chicago University and published recently in the Nature Human Behaviour journal, 350 American teenagers were given a ‘news article’ to read – an expose-style piece which contrived to show how the adults who run big food companies spend billions on manipulative advertising pushing sugary, fatty treats purely to enrich investors, whilst a second group was given conventional advice on the benefits of healthy eating. The results were striking, as both groups had their canteen habits subsequently monitored for a three month following period. The first group, particularly boys, reduced their purchases of unhealthy snacks by about a third, whilst the second group showed absolutely no change to their habits whatsoever.

The ‘prop-agenda’ delivered instantly; just as every momentary challenge to the self-interest or awareness of the recipient has always successfully done since the dawn of human communications. The more usual mundane mere ‘shove it in your face or down your throat’ old-fashioned mass propaganda style simply doesn’t cut through any more.

Industrial era baby-boomers, back in the day, were fed a societal story of mass production, middle-class aspirational values and global tillage; and in a world then dominated by giant media houses and little individual communication, this rote-fed diet worked – it was, after all, the only one available.

More recently this style of mass propaganda wore off in effectiveness with the Gen X’ers (the oldest of which are now around 40) as the tech era dawned in the 1980’s and spawned more modern societal beliefs, championed by individual freedoms, where ‘different’ was hailed and heralded as good -and ‘uniqueness’ in thought, act and deed was even better.

Today, in a world shortly to be inherited by the kids of this generation – it’s the new Generation Z’eds who now believe that pure data is both knowledge and birth right, and that tapping on glass provides the ‘always on, always available and always changing’ methodologies and routes to follow. It’s the new Meconomy, where ‘my own individuality dominates’ (or at least they like to believe it does).

Yet, they’re all still so easily manipulated… by carefully crafted prop-agenda, just as our ‘so-smart’ Texan schoolkids were. Today is now the era of the short attention span, where people are bombarded by soundbites and social media clicks, in the instantaneous day and age of overwhelming content and choice. Free to choose? Ask Donald Trump or the Brexiteers across the Atlantic who’ve led the charge in selling the prop-agenda of the day, if people really are as free to choose and act as they think fit.

Sure; it’s a world where no-one reads anything longer than a tweet, where the word ‘google’ has become an everyday verb instead of an obscure noun for a long math number and where YouTube’s short video clips are watched in excess of 4.5 million times a minute – yet it’s a world where a brief, inexpensive and scaleable intervention can still cause mind shifts and manipulation. You’ve just got to get it right.

Michael Jackson is a world-travelling conference speaker on the subject of change. To date he’s spoken at over 2700 events in some 46 countries. Find out more at www.theothermichaeljackson.com