Baby Love

More information about this condom campaign, which focuses on depicting an obnoxious iPhone app, can be found here. Note that the application appears not to be available from the iPhone store, although one can purchase the "Spice Dice" application from Durex.

"AIDS.gov Failed"

Miguel Gomez took a very different approach from other speakers at the Gov 2.0 Expo by opening his presentation about AIDS.gov by asserting that AIDS.gov was a failure. Of course, this attention-getting gambit wasn't a real admission of failure, since Gomez described a highly successful campaign that his program had initiated in which those who text 566948 from cell phones could quickly find an HIV testing center. But he did explain how people scared about HIV "don't care about Twitter" and how 80% of users simply wanted information about the disease.

I've described several times on this blog how I would advise the government against creating still more domain names not tied to specific federal agencies that would have the responsibility to maintain them, but apparently the Obama administration is also planning to launch "tobacco.gov," "obesity.gov," and several other similar sin sites. But I have to give Gomez credit for a good argument about "repurposing content" and how the text from a blog posting could be reused as a podcast script and picked over for factoids to be tweeted at Twitter. He also described how excessive monitoring of user-generated content on the HIV.gov page on Facebook proved to be unnecessary and how "the community took care of it already" when a single abusive comment appeared.

Despite the program's revamping, I still think there are oddities in how AIDS.gov seems to conceive of its audience. A prominent section on "Using New Media" seems particular inappropriate for its client population and its frontline community service providers.

Some of My Best Friends are Geographers

Geographers are so cool. You just don't see rhetoricians wearing hardhats on their department pages. And thanks to Governing Temptation for noting the theoretical contribution of the Virtualpolitik book to the study of social advertising and social advertising. The project is described as a "soft paternalism blog" from the Aberystwyth Department of Geography and Earth Studies. The team includes Rhys Jones, a cultural and historical geographer who works on the various geographies of the state and its related group identities, Mark Whitehead, who does research on the links between geography, philosophy and environmental politics, and Jessica Pykett, who studies "the changing nature of educational governance and pedagogical forms of state-citizen relations."

Stick Figures without Happy Faces

This fake social advertising campaign from Cleanternet.org, which provides a tongue-in-cheek plug for Internet-blocking technologies, uses an infographics style that has also begun to appear in real public service announcements. It is the product of designer Alexander Lehmann, who blogs here. In addition to commercial digital art for films like District 9, Lehmann also does less politically tinged motion graphics and typography films.

Check out his other online "campaigns," such as "You are a Terrorist," which makes the case for ubiquitous surveillance.

Thanks for Ren Reynolds for the link!

The Ministry of Distraction

Watching ads on television, at first I thought that I must have somehow misheard the pitch for the government website Distraction.gov. Although the Obama administration has been associated with a plethora of new domain names not related to government agencies, they have mostly had positive connotations that support the image of the authority of the state like AStrongMiddleClass.gov or MakingHomeAffordable.gov.

Now Distraction.gov offers official warnings against vehicular multitasking with ubiquitous communication technologies complete with a PSA against talking and texting while driving.

Update: Ironically, the New York Times points out in this article that government employees like paramedics or police officers are some of the worst offenders when it comes to using high-tech gadgets as they drive.

Stubbed Out

Most public health games have a moralistic goody-two-shoes message, but not Smoking Kills, which encourages the player to join M.A.B.A.S. or the Mysterious Association of BadAsses Against Smokers and promptly begin directing to the player to aim his or her sniper fire against smoking stick-figure people. Killing smokers in dark alleys and movie theaters was relatively simple, but soon the game requires stratagems involving coconuts on tropical beaches and misdirecting traffic.

Google Voted Most Likely to Succeed

Today was the last chance to vote in Project 10 to the 100, which describes itself as a kind of opinion-gathering engine that is designed to find consensus about which of the world's problems or issues should be the focus of philanthropic energies. I find the rhetoric of surplus in their publicity materials interesting.

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big.

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

It looks as though the entries were often driven by particular interest groups who still urge pet projects that may ignore the organizational and systemic character of real NGO or non-profit work. I was particularly suspicious to see "social entrepreneurship," a popular neoliberal buzzword among the choices.

(I voted for public transportation! Yay Paris Metro, Aichi maglev train, and London double-decker bus.)

Taking the Rap

Flu.gov sponsored a contest designed to get the word out about preventing transmission of the H1N1 virus. This winning entry from "KRS-H1N1" makes reference to rapper KRS-One, who is known for his work on HIV prevention in Africa. Doctor John D. Clarke, the "rapping doctor," has performed other songs in the past about diseases like diabetes that similarly emphasize a few simple rules that patients can easily follow.

S.O.B. Story

MoveOn.org is publicizing Will Ferrell's latest political video. It's a slickly produced video with celebrities that is very different from a lot of the DIY video content about the health care debate. Although Ferrell is famous for his Bush parodies, his group at FunnyOrDie has also had fun mocking the green movement as well.

Couples Counseling

This mock public service announcement from Throw'd TV ridicules the competition and mistrust that can enter into a couple's relationship when Facebook becomes the dominant social relationship at issue. There are a number of humorous online break-up videos already, but this one playfully mixes online pages with physical bodies, Internet events with the temporalities of work and home, and virtual gifts with material assets involved in recognized forms of reciprocality.

Vacation from Reality

Hilarious libertarian PSA that comes to Virtualpolitik thanks to Ian Bogost.

The Enemy Within

EraseDoubt.org, a new HIV awareness campaign being launched by the County of Los Angeles aims to use social computing to raise public willingness to participate in testing. Although testing for a sexually-transmitted disease is generally associated with privacy, the campaign touts its Facebook page as a place to see photos of an event. Their Twitter feed, however, shows a lack of familiarity with the rhetorical conventions around microblogging since it just reads like a series of press release headings. Given the use of the "Is It in You?" slogan by the Gatorade company and the poor technical and artistic quality of the content on their YouTube channel, along with the fact that their supposedly cutting-edge Flash animation on their site is limited to rollovers, it seems the this press release overstated the comprehensiveness of their online campaign.

Wake Up Humans

The ethics of the "Wake Up Humans" at Amnesty International Belgium are complicated. The campaign uses elements of alternate reality games that incorporate SMS messages, seemingly hijacked websites, and street theatre to generate interest in their human rights campaigns and lead traffic to their website. And yet the use of what is essentially a hoax to make a rhetorical point might seem to strengthen the claims of those who often dismiss concerns about the improper exercise of state authority as conspiratorial delusion.

Thanks to Osocio for the link!

Letting the Klan March

The National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex unions, is hardly a liberal cause, but they have taken up the flag of digital rights advocacy of late in their current social advertising campaign in which a would-be Miss America makes the argument for free speech against legitimizing the relationship of gay couples. (For more about the campaign, see my posting "Queen for a Day" at Osocio.)

In "Copyright Experts Blast Hilton Claims Against NOM Ad" the group reprints blog entries from digital rights organizations in support of NOM's use of the intellectual property of celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, given the context of critique and political speech in keeping with fair use. The entry cites Copyrights and Campaigns and Citizen Media Law Project as support for their position, although the latter points out the hypocrisies of both Perez Hilton and NOM when it comes to making copyright claims, since in the past Hilton had been a fair use advocate when it came to the republishing unlicensed tabloid photos with minor Photoshop additions, and NOM had been a copyright cop to try to reclaim rights to leaked green screen footage from another ad.

Like the ACLU backing the marches of the Klu Klux Klan, First Amendment claims made in the name of fair use may bring unlikely political parties together. However, it may be just as significant to note who is not there. For example, note the absence of Virtualpolitik pals Feminist Law Professors and Madisonian.net. Perhaps they find the claim in the ad that legal scholars believe such equal protection will generate "widespread legal conflict" with "devastating" effects ridiculous.

DJs and Monkeys and Swishers, Oh My!

The DJ as rhetorician is becoming an important figure in academia. NYU's Aram Sinnreich has done an entire book-length study of DJ practices, and Spencer Schaffner has given academic talks in DJ form. Graduate students like Michael Bullock and Kevin Driscoll are also identifying themselves with the DJ m métie.

The DJ was also an important figure at today's session of Persuasive 2009, BJ Fogg, the father of captology as an academic discipline made the argument that the group's work aimed to "make the world a better place" through "mass interventions" that were altruistic rather than intended to "make a ton of money."

Fogg was suggesting a different matrix for thinking about persuasion that was fundamentally different from more conventional models for persuasive technologies, which he characterized in the bulleted list below:

• Change attitude – behavior
• Deep thinking
• Theory guides steps
• Control intervention
• Measure result
• Share with experts

Now he argued that "tradition" could be at odds with "impact," so he outlined three possible approaches that might be more successful in the age of the Internet.

1) "Million Monkeys" used automated or random mechanics to generate results. Like the "infinite monkey theory," it relied on creating many trials, on the assumption that traditional focus groups often couldn't create true viral sensations such as YouTube's Fred because they weren't considering enough possible results. As an example, Fogg showed Hunch, which "helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it." Fogg argued that this approach fostered "branching knowledge" as content-creators kept busy "rolling out interventions."

2) "Savvy DJs" also uses creating many trials, but Fogg argued that for this group "metrics drive iteration." Just as a DJ has an audience and finds grooves people respond to, persuasive technologies could thing about "moving crowd and changing it up" by taking advantage of "feedback loops" and rapid analysis of "matching patterns." Fogg takes lessons from RockYou!, zynga, and slide as top application creators. He interviews Jia Shen and Johnnie Manzari to learn about how they "iterate multiple times a day" by being in constant contact via cell phone, since they need to watch metrics constantly and are "obsessing about the numbers all day and all night." Fogg argued that a program like Texting for Health fits this model, particularly since "what happens" can be tracked with a "built-in user base."

3) "Swishers" represents a more refined and analytic approach based on the sensibility of a critical individual. Fogg takes as his model Kara Swisher of the Boom Town all things digital blog for the Wall Street Journal, who "already analyzes what already exists." Like the DJ, this activity involves "pattern matching intelligence," where it "could be person or could be code," she resists the "schedule drives output" mode with her appealing video format that may well change "how we do journalism." In his talk, Fogg showed her working method in which viewers never ever see her face but understand her critical commentary through the eye of her flip camera. As Fogg notes, "people love point of view," although "as scientists, we are resistant to point of view."

Lenses of Contact

As someone generally interested in raising awareness of "architectures of control," I've been a big fan of Dan Lockton's Design with Intent blog for a while, because it draws attention to how our experiences of consumerism and urbanism involve interactions with designed systems that reinforce particular kinds of rules. Today, at the Persuasive 2009 conference, Lockton presented part of his Design with Intent Toolkit, which outlined six possible "lenses" through which to see the design process. Given this toolkit, Lockton's work is also obviously relevant to my own interest in government persuasion around the four trends that I followed in the Virtualpolitik book: public diplomacy, social marketing, risk communication, and institutional branding, as political institutions move away from print-based media and toward computational media platforms.

Lockton began his talk with a series of behavioral contradictions that compromise energy efficiency as consumers buy energy-efficient light bulbs but leave them on all night, never explore other settings on their washers, leave water running while brushing teeth, and -- in his own country -- indulge in unnecessary overfilling of teakettles that if not wasted would provide almost enough energy to power all the street lights across the UK.

In looking at the level of "simple interaction with an everyday product," Lockton suggested a number of obvious conundrums, such as "What level do I work at?" in relation to the interface or "Whose side am I on?" in relation to ethical boundaries. As he put it, "Is it still user-centered design if we are trying to change behavior rather than accommodate it?"

To try to visualize these questions, Lockton provided three diagrams that represented 1) motivating behavior, 2) enabling behavior, and 3) constraining behavior. As an example of the motivational category of persuasion, he pointed out the presence of the EcoButton in the attendees' conference swag bags and briefly explained how the gadget worked. He also cited a number of influences on his work. For example, in explaining the role of "reduction" and "tunneling," he payed homage to B.J. Fogg, who was sitting in the second row, and he also praised the aesthetic of simplicity epitomized by John Maeda. He also displayed a number of quotations that emphasized the larger philosophical dimensions in these kinds of design activities. He noted the continuing influence of Buckminster Fuller as well, particularly in regard to making modifications in the environment to "get man moving in the right direction." (Fuller was also an important figure in Fred Turner's talk at U.C. Irvine last week.) In acknowledging influences on his thinking, Lockton wasn't afraid to air some of the potentially disturbing aspects of persuasive technologies that might actually remove options for users, which runs contrary to the principles of those like Heinz von Foerster who only want to maximize liberty through invention. As he pointed out, hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson once cynically defined technology as something that somebody wants someone to submit to, and Cory Doctorow similarly noted that no customer woke up this morning wishing to do less with his or her property. He also gave a plug for the book Nudge and the work of Richard Thayler.

Lockton then quickly reviewed the six lenses that constitute each "worldview on behavior change." They include the Persuasive lens, which includes "self-monitoring" and "kairos," the
Cognitive lens that addresses heuristics, structures of bias, and constructs of self-interest, which includes "social proof" and "framing," the Errorproofing lens, which includes "defaults" and "interlock," the Architectural lens, which includes "positioning" and "layouts," the Visual lens, which includes "prominence" and "metaphors," and finally the Security lens that less ethically seems to use components to coerce, which includes "surveillance" and "atmospherics." However, he pointed out that using classical music to drive away younger users was in practice not much different from using the smell of fresh-baked bread to draw customers in. Furthermore, in response to the constraints of the errorproofing approach, he asserted that when it came to nuclear safety or preventing medical error, few would advocate for the user's liberty.

For Lockton, these categories were often mixed, so that the same design choice could be read through multiple lenses. For example, Amazon's feature that informs users of what others who bought the same product also bought served both "social proof" and "kairos."

He then ran through a series of designed scenarios from a sign over a lightswitch reading "your bonus depends on this" to a two-color switch that seems visibly disorded when switched on. He even described a system created by a designer from the University of Chicago that dimmed lights as appliances and lights were turned on to raise awareness about excessive energy use.

Family and State

Who would have thought that three years ago when I wrote about 4parents.gov, the federal government's website devoted to teen abstinence that it would still be online post-Obama? Yet, despite the Bristol Palin unwed teen fiasco for the Republicans and a mountain of data that shows that abstinence education doesn't work, official rhetoric still emphasizes this unlikely conjunction of family and state.

Here's the home page of the site during the Bush administration, shortly after it was launched in 2005.


And here it is in 2009 with an almost identical abstinence message.

Many of the hokey "coversation starters" designed for parents to discourage teens from becoming sexual active are almost identical to the regrettable ones from the previous administration.

2005: "I was at the store yesterday and ran into Kendrick, Mrs. Jakes' son. He is joining the military after high school. What do you think you want to do when you graduate from high school?"

2009: "I was at the store yesterday and ran into Richard, Mrs. Jackson’s son. He joined AmeriCorps right after high school. What do you think you want to do when you graduate from high school?"

Note the subsitution of "military" with "AmeriCorps."

Fortunately, at least praise to the right-wing National Physicians Center has been omitted and particularly sexist sections of the Bush era FAQ have been deleted, such as this gem of oversimplified generalization that assumes that biology is destiny:

Why do males and females seem to respond differently to parental direction?

Males sometimes respond well to concrete, direct language, while girls often respond well to feeling, relational language. Direction with only a few words may work for males, while females may prefer more details and explanation.

But the site's continuing existence raises a legitimate question: is the most pressing message that the government has to get to parents the one about controlling their children's sexuality outside of marriage?

I would think that there are other ways that state authority is either more directly helped or hindered by parental authority, which merit a more appropriate apportionment of digital rhetoric. For example, what are you doing as a parent to encourage your children to vote, serve on juries, and take part in other forms of civic participation? Or what are you doing as a parent to ensure that your children obey the rule of law and respect the state? Or are there any ways that you as a parent may be using your parental authority to flout the law or violate principles of justice, such as beating your children, which far too many parents do?

Obviously, the updated site, like many webpages produced by the Obama administration also incorporates links to official content posted on commercial social media platforms like Twitter, but since receiving scoldings about privacy from digital rights activists like Chris Soghoian, they at least include a lengthy disclaimer.

You are about to leave the 4Parents.gov website. 4Parents.gov provides links to other Internet sites as a service to its users, and is not responsible for the availability or content of these external sites. 4Parents.gov, its employees, and contractors do not endorse, warrant, or guarantee the products, services, or information described or offered at these other Internet sites. Any reference to a commercial product, process, or service is not an endorsement or recommendation by the 4Parents.gov, its employees, or contractors. For documents available from this server, the U.S. Government does not warrant or assume any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed.

On the 4parents.gov site, you can also check out how the new "Gadget" public service announcement is being customized for non-white audiences.

I also thought I might look at other sites on .gov domains about policing female sexuality to see how they have changed under a Democratic president. See this home page for girlshealth.gov in 2007 and ask yourself why there is no boyshealth.gov?

Notice how the same emphasis on pastel colors and consumerism still persists in 2009.


Although there isn't any menshealth.gov to complement womenshealth.gov, it's interesting to observe that this site was surprisingly progressive under the Bush administration and even included information about emergency contraception and lesbian health.

Lightning Strikes More than Once

In "Funny Anti-Gay Marriage Ad Sparks YouTube Revolt," Wired reports about the digital afterlife of the "Storm" PSA ad from the National Organization for Marriage that expresses strong sentiments about the imagined dangers of same-sex unions. The ad has been widely mocked on cable channels and has received notable jibes from Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow.

The fun really began when Human Rights Campaign leaked the green screen footage of the auditions of the actors' wooden acting, so that mash-up madness had an opportunity to run wild on YouTube, even though NOM keeps making copyright claims on the content that it finds and filing takedown notices. (This link will still take you to the footage, complete with humorous annotations.)

For example, a video that uses compositing software to include klansmen and Nazis in the ad complains about how intellectual property law is being applied against political responses to the ad:

We are removing the name of the organization because YouTube has begun removing all the videos that have re-edited or reuploaded. By the way, they recently removed all the audition tapes of all these actors that have appeared in the videos. Yes, none of these people are who they claim. They are ALL actors.

They might be sending out a lot of take down notices. And besides, there are many videos that would be hard to describe as including direct copies of the group's digital files. Now there are spoofs with live action, chatbot-style parodies, and send-ups with puppets. Given that YouTube is well known for celebrations of bad acting (and that the Internet is generally associated with dissimulation already), it's understandable that the topic is irresistible for videos like this one.

Update: Mack McCoy points out a great parody here.

Help a Needy Investment Banker

This send-up of the starving children televised appeal provides a humorous mash-up of two genres: the government video and the charity TV ad. In reality, the Treasury Department has been relatively slow producing online video, especially in comparison to Britain, where the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has its own YouTube channel at HM Treasury.

Missing for Action

The Ad Council has made a number of online widgets about public health and safety available for social computing applications, so Internet content-creators can also publicize their favorite causes on their blogs and social network profiles.

What's strange is the suburban, middle-class, heterosexist orientation of the list of acceptable causes in the Ad Council campaign. For example, like many of my generation who have gone to too many funerals for gay and bisexual friends, I immediately looked for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment among the twenty-four designated causes. Not there.

Then, as a feminist and cancer survivor, I looked for breast cancer or gynecological cancers represented among the widget options, but there was only a generic "C-Change" choice with a sport-shirt wearing couple, so issues about gender were obviated for potential activists. In fact, there is a widget for "Men's Preventive Health" but nothing for women.

And just to make sure that I didn't miss the patriarchal subtext, I could choose the widget for "Responsible Fatherhood." Not "Parenthood" mind you, as though many adult parties could improve a child's welfare, but "Fatherhood." What does this imply about single-sex or same-sex households? What does this imply about the choices of mothers and their agency as "responsible" people?


Not even anti-smoking pitches were included among the widgets, despite the Ad Council's history of promoting hard-hitting campaigns that have been known to alienate corporate sponsors with their frank assertions.

So what's more important than preventing killer addictions, deadly STDs, unwanted pregnancy, and rape? Look below for the widget displaying a prurient fascination with scantily clad young girls and their naughty online behavior, a theme in far too many social marketing campaigns about online practices.