March 31, 2003
Preaching to the Choir
So, upon returning from my vacation, I promptly got sick for the entire weekend. As such, I was in the mood for Seth’s great, less-than-optimistic post (which I assume he wrote while recovering from his own more serious illness).
Though I think Seth has hit a lot of nails square on the head, I want to address some of the benefits to preaching to the choir. I started to think about this after reading Matt Yglesias’ reference to a Michael Walzer article about this subject, which I’ve got to track down at some point.
1. As Yglesias briefly points out, preaching to the choir is often a more efficient use of resources. How so? With any given subject, there are only a limited number of people who are ever going to be knowledgeable about it. Within that subset, there’s a limited number who will ever go beyond knowing and actually care about the subject. Beyond that, there are still fewer who are care enough to do anything. The difference between the last two categories generally involves the degree to which the people care about the subject.
Preaching to the choir (by definition) involves talking to people who already care. Still, it can make them care more – perhaps enough to actually act. What it takes to make this shift, I don’t know. Regardless, preaching to these people can often help make that jump.
2. There’s another category of people: those who care but aren’t knowledgeable. I assume that there are a lot of people out there who are anti-circumvention and mandates, but don’t really know what’s going on. They can talk generally about these problems, but they don’t know specifics. (I remember being one of these people, and, to an extent, I still am one.)
Preaching to this choir is helpful because these people cannot carry on the message to others without knowing some degree of specifics. People who know nothing about these subjects will not be captivated by general talk of “free culture,” consumer rights, or the freedom to tinker. To get them to care, they need know what specifically is being done and how certain policies could specifically affect them. Without this grounding in reality and actual policy, the discussion will be too abstract and philosophical to make someone care.
3. This is not to say that being specific is all that’s important. It’s important to be able to discuss more abstract concepts – but how to do this?
Often, the choir might agree with the preacher, but they certainly can’t preach like them. Listening to the preacher shows the choir not only what’s going on, but how to talk about it. Often, this means cutting the problems down to bite-sized chunks: stories, analogies, farces that come too close to reality, quips, even cliches. It’s this ability to take complex subjects and make them easily comprehensible that makes people like Professor Lessig amazing. Similarly, Professor Zittrain is a great speaker not just because he’s so knowledgeable, but because he always manages to get this audience laughing (at least, that’s my experience with him).
…I’ve got more to say on this, but for now, I’ll have to leave it at that. I’ll also try to catch up on more of the news I missed ASAP.
Filed by Derek Slater at 1:33 pm under General news
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