GS: Why can't you just tell people what the meaning of, say, polluting is?
GN: You can. It's called propaganda.
GS: Why shouldn't we use propaganda then? Why do you have to let people discover the meaning of such things for themselves?
GN: The discovery of radical alternatives happens in smaller steps and in individual minds and hearts. For example, I love baking and I used to do a lot of it in my big old gas oven. Then I put a sensor in my kitchen and learned that a lot of CO2 gets produced. Even after I turn the oven off, hours afterward, CO2 was still sitting in my kitchen to a tune of 2,000 parts per million. The cookies were long gone and I was still sitting in a soup of gas. Once I became aware of that, my wife and I got a convection oven instead, and now we bake with that. I bake less and the oven is a little smaller, but I don't have a CO2 lake in my kitchen anymore. It became actionable to do less because of harm reduction, essentially.
Greg Niemeyer is an artist and game programmer working with interactive art at UC Berkeley. He integrates game mechanics and behavioral economics into projects that get people to change their behavior. I love the above quote from his interview with CITRUS, referencing one of his latest sensor projects that allows people to easily monitor their own air quality.
We try to force meaning onto people all the time. It's not just called propaganda. It's also called advertising.
