Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [99]
Unfortunately, this process is not without critics. Educators, cultural critics, and futurists all see a dim future in students’ acquisition of knowledge from the erosion in their learning habits. The careful study of multiple sources is being quickly exchanged for the website with the clearest bullet points.
Neil Postman, a former professor at NYU, has written many books on the subject of communication and education. I believe every marketer should read his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman outlines many of these issues and the cultural movement in that very prophetic book written before the modern Internet. In an even more prophetic book from his earlier works, Postman refers to the attention divide as follows:
“consciousness of the process of abstraction.” That is, consciousness of the fact that out of the virtually infinite universe of possible things to pay attention to, we abstract only certain portions, and those portions turn out to be the ones for which we have verbal labels and categories.
—Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Delta, 1971
Granted, Postman is explaining the human ability to refine information on a large universal scale, but even on our small scale of considering the online reader’s attention, it explains the behavior of filtering out unnecessary or slow-paced information in order to quickly find the abstractions of words and short concepts that fit the semantic picture of our information need.
From an educator’s standpoint, this trend of dividing information into small labels and information bits is troubling, because the move to embracing technology in the classroom has not produced better students but more disengaged students. These new students are more adept at speedy browsing of social media sites and have no patience for the slower pace of the participatory, isolated experience that deep reading requires. Professor and author Mark Bauerlein puts it like this:
That’s the drift of screen reading. Yes, it’s a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention—in a word, slow reading.
—Mark Bauerlein, “Online Literacy Is a Different Kind,” The Chronicle Review, Volume 54, Issue 31, Page B7
As both a parent and a marketer, I am torn, just as I am torn in the subject of marketing to children. I find myself both fascinated and repelled by the concept. While understanding how information is derived from websites and building information accordingly, am I contributing to a lower form of literacy? While performing activities that improve profits, are we also reducing levels of engagement with critical content?
As a marketer, how do we react to this, understand it, learn it, and then apply this knowledge? Postman answers this very question:
The way to be liberated from the constraining effects of any medium is to develop a perspective on it—how it works and what it does. Being illiterate in the processes of any medium (language) leaves one at the mercy of those who control it.
—Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity
As a marketer who desires to utilize these concepts, I believe the best means of using and benefiting from developing persuasive content online is to study it. Know and understand how it works, and command it, rather than being commanded by it; in doing so you also become aware of when it is being used to persuade you.
The first step is to be self-aware of your own reading and scanning habits. What websites do you tend to visit more than others? Is it because of the arrangement of scannable content? How often do you find yourself scanning headlines, bullet points, and paragraph