From Meta, a wiki about Wikimedia
Below is a snapshot of the previous contents of the Wikipedia article Persuasion technology. The links to Wikipedia are now fixed, but not very elegantly. It also needs a new introduction to make it a proper Meta article.
In deciding what to include in the new article I have been quite ruthless in eliminating things I suspected of being either unclear or controversial, erring on the side of caution. So the new article is far shorter.
Persuasion technology (or persuasion aids or presentation aids or coercion aids or coercion technology) is the most general term for w:presentation technology and technologies used in w:brainwashing, w:cult recruiting and w:hard sell methodologies. Any technology designed and deployed for those purposes can be considered to be a persuasion technology - a more neutral term that does not assume w:coercion.
Assumptions that technology is coercive are common among those who use this term. Those who don't often refuse to differentiate adaptive technologies of persuasion that exploit discovered weaknesses of the audience in real time, and pressure one person or group to commit, from w:mass media broadcast w:advertising or even w:public broadcasting that reinforces widely held views. If one denies this distinction, one may see the role of technology as akin to w:peer pressure or the persuasive powers of a skilled w:orator - not in itself something to be studied.
Also, since most of the technologies described have non-persuasive or social uses, some refer to persuasion by technology or persuasion via technology. However, there are also technologies, e.g. w:PowerPoint, that are clearly designed for persuasive power, and are constantly enhanced based on feedback - from persuaders.
| Table of contents |
Generally, persuasion technology is used to augment a human face-to-face or voice interaction, particularly in a selling or other situation where the seller seeks to gain an edge on the buyer. In this general sense, 'sellers' can be those promoting a particular point of view, and 'buyers' anyone they recruit. Political or religious views can be promoted using the same methods and technologies, as became obvious in recent times as the use of advanced technologies became affordable for nearly any group.
What distinguishes a persuasion or coercive presentation technology is the impossibility of the individual being persuaded from responding with or creating an equally-effective response in real time. Whereas in ordinary conversation, an individual speaking from his or her own experience or views may be more eloquent, but does not achieve a technological and arguably unfair advantage.
Compare that situation to a w:radio talk show, or the w:TV news, and the differences become obvious. A w:host or w:journalist enjoys the priveleged position and can cut off speakers, refer to carefully prepared materials or questions prepared beforehand. Objections to the slant or the assumptions, or in the case of w:advertising the pitch can be muted by likewise referring to scripts.
Those answering the questions or raising the objection simply cannot do this, as they have not seen the pitch before, and do not have the technology or time. The technological and preparation advantage of the radio host, TV host, w:weblog w:sysop, or experienced w:salesman is decisive - in this sense technology is no more an edge than preparation.
However, technology stands alone as a pre-defined body of preparation - w:Lawrence Lessig observed that source code and its architecture are the decisive influence on most ordinary decisions of how communications work. And, social institutions and w:power, tend to form both the technology's priorities and how it is used to address the society's important issues:
Persuasion technology is of particular interest to political leadership, who can exploit characteristics of certain media to ensure their message is heard, and not diluted, while simultaneously breaking up the dissent; The growth of 'w:narrowcasting' has made it possible to reach friends and avoid enemies - the w:email lists are the most obvious example. If they control the actual medium in which their message is expressed, there is every chance that they can anticipate objections and select responses - this is called w:spin control and those who do it are w:spin doctors.
Politicians, increasingly, can control the time they spend in front of the press, make themselves a scarce resource, and effectively force members of the press to please them or lose access. Politicians have access to other, more persuasive, forms of technology, including email, the web, television advertising, and etc. - thus persuasion may be implicit whenever politics meets electronic media. w:Noam Chomsky, w:Douglas Rushkoff, w:Jane Jacobs and w:Marshall McLuhan among others have claimed that this is in fact the case, although they say quite different potential problems. w:Media theory is concerned with issues of how the characteristics of media itself influence the decision or options or speed with which the decision is considered - itself a kind of w:culture bias if the media or technology that one uses to make decisions is a 'culture'.
Different scenarios of locale, vocabulary, and technology result in some well-known impacts, e.g. w:infrastructure bias, on persuasive ability:
Technologies that pretend to be egalitarian and equal access, such as w:Instant messaging or w:email or w:wikipedia, have great potential for use in persuasion, as they eliminate the most obvious objections that one group has power over another (aside from hardware access, bandwidth, typing speed and language mastery, which are themselves major barriers).
The deployment of bots in an IM medium, scripts and responders and forwarding filters in email, and the extreme power of sysops or script-authoring users over any wiki (but most especially wikipedia where there is no central system of real governance nor any board of directors), clearly provide a substantial edge that is based purely on technology and skills that are associated with it.
Accordingly, these technologies are not particularly 'egalitarian' when compared to traditional w:meeting systems - except insofar as they permit participation by people who are widely geographically distributed and not required to come to a single physical place to discuss things - itself possibly a more potent barrier to participation than communications technology.
Future potentials for persuasion technology range from the benign to the dystopic. Some view all communications technology as good and a 'rising tide' that will ultimately enable rural and urban people to participate in a common w:civics. Others view these technologies as inherently bad and distractive from one's physical surroundings, i.e. the w:environment - and from social relationships with one's family and friends who are truly and uniquely physically present. Some consider the idea of w:community via technology to be the most dangerous, as it permits people to pretend to some shared tolerances or shared values that simply do not exist. The explosion of w:telemarketing fraud in recent years is evidence for this, as many cheated individuals claim they were 'raised to trust in people' - a stark indictment of the power that technology gives to the untrustworthy to evade the responsibility of their actions, say across national borders.
Another concern is that so-called w:pervasive computing (or "w:augmented reality" in the words of its promoters) will lead to w:carceral states where there is little or no w:consumer privacy, w:customer privacy or even w:political privacy. w:Client confidentiality in the professions would have little meaning as w:Total Information Awareness and similar programs picked up conversations, e.g. between lawyer and client, and made it easier for police or intelligence officials to extract confessions from persons who had no way of knowing whether confidentiality had been broken.
Beginning with non-intrusive monitoring (such as temperature, perspiration, nervous behaviour, vocal stress), adaptive persuasion monitors susceptibility and receptivity and adjusts itself accordingly.
A less extreme statement of this potential is that individuals prompted by means of mobile communications technologies could be enabled to persuade us at random, identifying who we were and what we "need to be sold" by a combination of biometric identification and online auctions trading directly in their attention, which they could no longer control.
System alert: turn to the person next to you and say, "rough night?" and begin a sales pitch of some alertness pill. This is clearly technically feasible but might lead to social resistances that make it impractical compared to present methods of coercion.
Finally, there is potential according to some for truly drastic extension of spying and monitoring into the human senses and brain itself. Such a "w:cognotechnology", which has actually been proposed by researchers at the w:United States military's w:Lawrence Livermore Labs, would have the potential to "detect criminal intent before it happens" and prevent an undesired behavior. In this case, no persuasion of an overt nature would be required, as the desire to behave contrary to authority would itself be extinguished at source. Whether this is practical or not, it is being discussed as if it might be, and that in itself has persuasive potential, e.g. directing funding for research into neurosciences and intelligence.
The extreme view of this potential is that a w:technological singularity will simply place the collection and distribution of information about us beyond human control entirely, and we will be persuaded by the equivalent of "disembodied voices", prompting us, as often reported by sufferers of w:schizophrenia. The technology involved would be incomprehensible and opaque, equivalent to magic or angels or demons to the average person.
These scenarios would seem to be the ultimate in persuasion technologies. They might also seem to be the ultimate in w:paranoia - w:dystopias that project current trends to logical absurdity. At the very least, they require levels of w:collective intelligence and even w:artificial intelligence somewhat beyond that available for any current use.
Interestingly, the computer industry itself provides some examples of rejecting certain technologies simply for their power to persuade: w:Scott McNealy of w:Sun Microsystems declared his company a w:PowerPoint-Free Zone, which was seen as a simple attack on his rival w:Bill Gates of w:Microsoft. But w:Lou Gerstner of w:IBM went further, and declared that no w:presentation technology at all would be used in his office, but that proposals would have to be presented on a single overhead slide with a single color of marker. He spoke strongly against the distraction of effort into persuasive presentations, and away from the core elements of business cases and real customer service. He did not, unlike Sun, ban his own salespeople from using these - a tacit acknowledgement that there was indeed power to sway decisions in such methods and technologies - and that he considered it an obligation to stockholders not to be himself swayed by it in his own office.
 How to Get on Radio Talk Shows All Across America w/o Leaving Home |
 This Broad's Life: The Raucous, Riveting Autobiography of the Most Outrageous Radio Talk-Show Host in America Today |
 You Can't Say That : Common Sense From America's Number One Gay Radio Talk Show Host |
 How to Get On Radio Talk Shows All Across America | ||||
 Talk Show Selects 1999: A Guide to the Nation's Most Influential Television and Radio Talk Shows |
 Talk Show Selects 1998: A Guide to the Nation's Most Influential Television and Radio Talk Shows (1998 Edition) |
 Talk Show Yearbook 2000: A Guide to the Nation's Most Influential Television and Radio Talk Shows (Talk Show Selects, 2000) |
 Conduct a National Radio Talk Show Tour Without Leaving Your Home or Office...Without Paying a Cent for Air Time (How to Make People Buy Whatever You) | ||||
