September 07, 2004
9/7 - Kon-Tiki Replica Voyage in 2005: Good thinking!
The original Kon-Tiki of 1947
Publicity stunts. That's what the oceans need right now. Seriously. Well thought-out and executed publicity stunts. We are dealing with a mass audience that is more numbed and distracted than ever before. Publicity stunts can break through this, even if only for a few short moments. Having run Shifting Baselines for almost two years I can attest that this is true. Most of the publicists I've worked with are just tired of the whole topic of ocean conservation and mostly now answer me with, "It's nice, but unless you can wrap it in a package that the general public finds interesting, you aren't going to find an audience."
Wouldn't want to let things devolve into a bunch of clown acts, but the publicists are mostly right.
So a group of Scandinavians have announced plans to build a replica of Thor Heyerdahl's balsa raft and sail from Peru to Tahiti, retracing the original voyage which sought to prove that parts of Polynesia might have been colonized by South Americans rather than Asian natives (though shown to be possible, few still believe it happened). Heyerdahl's grandson will be in the crew and along the way they will call attention to ocean decline.
What is perceptive of them is that they say, "People ask 'why don't you do this from a proper research ship?" Their answer is that they wouldn't get the same publicity for the research. Very smart. If only American ocean conservationists thought this clearly.
Posted by Randy Olson at September 7, 2004 05:36 AMBreaking news: Attention-spans at an all-time low. People only pay attention to the 20-second sound-bite. Even the big publicity stunts, if you can't capture attention in under 20 seconds, you probably won't.
Avoiding the rant about how people can't pay attention and the problems that causes...how do we work within this constraint. [Is the attention-span gap a shifted baseline, too?]
If anything, the sound-bite mentality shows that Shifting Baseline's use of media figures IS NECESSARY and EFFECTIVE! The general population are probably more likely to associate with movie & tv stars than 'real' people. Even the people that gripe about using media figures _are_ paying attention.
Keep using the movie & tv stars--they get attention in a near-zero attention world.