Friday, October 24, 2008

Future news-flash: your vote counts

A last-minute push to remind U.S. voters, ahead of the 4 November Presidential election, that every vote counts, using a short video clip from eerily familiar news provider CNNBC, dated Friday 7 November.



This personalised "future artifact" comes from the nonprofit political advocacy group MoveOn.org, and I have to say, political leanings notwithstanding; it's brilliant.

Guilt is a much more useful emotion to elicit prospectively, don't you think?

Send your own here.

Sure, I may not be eligible to vote (which makes my video counterfactual to boot) but as we all know, American citizens are not the only ones with a stake in this contest.

Update (28/10/08): I've just received an email from "The CNNBC Team" which begins:

Dear CNNBC viewer,

Wow. Thanks to people like you, this nonvoter video has now been sent to over 6.3 million friends. It's going out to more than 30 new people per second.

Research shows that this kind of social "nudging" is extremely effective. So we're aiming to reach 10 million people before Election Day—only a few days away.

Impressive figures. The combination of timeliness and surprising personalisation seems to be striking a chord.

The message mentions the effects of "nudge" research. I'm curious to what extent the mechanism of future-scenario immersion (via a vivid, and presumably non preferred near-future narrative; one satirical in tone, if seriously intentioned) affects folks' plans to vote.

(Thanks Ginny and Jim!)

2 comments:

Mashley Love said...

someone sent me this!!

Unknown said...

Thanks for sending it out, I actually just mailed my absentee ballot and so I felt "saved" from this Jacob Marley-type vision.