Day Three - Persuasion Class

I felt so bad this morning that we just all didn't get it together early enough for me to take Liam to preschool. It's so hard seeing the kids at night just enough to eat dinner, baths and put them to bed. I definitely can not sustain this in the long run. I've had a few parenting thoughts. One is that Liam has been struggling on his own timeline to dress himself, among other things. We give him lots of praise (I know, some folks don't think praise is so great - I've found that having a kid with some delays makes this issue slightly different, but I still wonder...) - anyway, for doing things "himself" - which is good he's able to do this stuff, but it seems so individualistic - I wonder if he's digesting the praise for the specific task or for just doing things himself, rather than collectively/working together, which I'd much rather teach him.

I also feel like with the rush of the morning and night that I'm not giving him enough time to just be a four year old and go at his own pace - this is nothing earth shattering, but what I realized today as he was watching the water go down the drain after his bath - is that I can so rarely take advantage of all of those teaching and creative moments - either that he can figure out himself or, more importantly, that I can help him with.

Today's class was even more challenging, in some ways. It's feeling a lot like it should have just been a workshop. At least we did small group exercises today - one 0n one persuassive talks - I guess I should have realized this class was going to be like a business training - but I'm much more interested in the research and less in the application. Today in one of our one-on-one talks, I was supposed to do a rap with Vktr, from Kzkstn. We were supposed to talk about our proudest moment. What came to mind immediately was birthing my children. I later thought, maybe it "should" have been my doc or something, but it was fun to connect with her in that way. She has an 18 year old son and when he was 4 years old she had to leave to go to Moscow to make enough money and had to leave her son with her parents. She was clearly sad then and now to be away from her son - it made me want to cherish this time with the kids so much - before they turn into resentful teenagers.

Well, now I'm back - had to do some one-on-one - one of the kids woke up the other screaming - took a 1/2 hour to calm both of them down...

JOURNAL FOR CLASS - Day 3
Watching and discussing 12 angry men reminded me of my first video I worked on when I started working for NC state gov't making videos - it was a jury training video - needless to say, it said nothing about persuasion. Even more interesting, I can't remember what it really talked about except we shot Charles Kuralt as the spokesperson. If we had made it 50 years earlier, Henry Fonda could have been our spokesperson...

I do wonder about the audience question. While he did have 12 angry men as his audience, they were all different - I'm still a little stumped on the framing of the message when an audience is diverse. Not that having an all white male jury is that diverse, but the nuances of their background characteristics did stand out in the movie. To get back to the health care debate (again), the insurance industry was so effective because they had just one audience to appeal to- middle class white voters. Do we get "in trouble" when we have mutliple audiences? Did Henry Fonda just cherry pick one at a time down the list?

Group Think - This reminds me of Chomsky's manufacturing of consent. Or of that Penn professor's analysis of the long-term media effects (rather than the short term issue of a kid seeing something violent on TV and then committing a violent act) - that the violence we see in the media causes us to be more fearful that it does to be violent ourselves. At any rate, with all of the classism, sexim, commercialism, racism, ism....ism....etc in the mass media and other mediated information - I wonder if it takes more than one meeting or speech to counteract all of this - I guess this is where the "repetition principle" comes in, but I think this is where I struggle with the larger political issues rather than individual "persuaders" in analyzing group think - i.e. wmd's in iraq - a huge chunk of americans still think they exist - just having the info out there that they don't hasn't changed people's minds - does that mean they have to change their whole outlook on what patriotism/bush, the system, etc. means? I know this is getting into the audience more than the persuader, but maybe that's what I need to examine if I'm interested in larger public audiences.

As I reflect on the public service announcements, training videos, and documentaries I have made, I fortunately had some great mentors who taught me about the audience principle, but I find quicker/less edited pieces (one night versus one year) like my one-on-one pitch today - was much harder - in all of the amalgamation I was mechanically attempting today, that was something I didn't put enough stock into during my rap. I realize now that I need to start that process before doing anything else, rather than trying to stuff my logos into a box (of course, every night, I stuff my son's legos into a box...)