Sex, sight and sound
Posted on 24. Feb, 2009 by NW1er in Communications, Health, Web 2.0
I couldn’t sleep last night so was fiddling with my Blackberry in bed – sad, I know. I came across the iGoogle function, which allows you to have a personalised news stream to your Blackberry. Great, because you only get three or so main news stories on the BBC mobile site. iGoogle feeds the top BBC, Guardian Unlimited and New Scientist stories in to one screen.
And hence my attention was drawn to a piece in the New Scientist, ‘Map reading skills change how we view beauty’. The story reported a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that investigated how men and women process photographs of environmental scenes they perceive to be beautiful. While the sample was small, the study found that men tend to use the right hemisphere of the brain to process beautiful landscapes, whereas women use both hemispheres. It was inferred that enviornments are perceived as beautiful by men based upon spatial issues, where as women apply a more categorical approach.
The story made me think about video content in web 2.0 world. As we know, citizen journalism and video-sharing software such as Google Video / YouTube have made video content a significant part of modern-day web-use: Increasingly the online community tells stories via moving pictures – this is no longer the privilege of big broadcasting corporations like the BBC, FOX etc. And so we need to think about how we adapt PR to match these trends – producing video content alongside press releases and tailoring this content for the different online channels – each aggregator will want their own exclusive angle – they are no different to newspapers in this regard. But what about gender differences? Is there something in this? Should PR video content be cut differently for male and female audiences, and I’m not just taking about tone, content and language, I’m talking about the specific images that are used…I don’t know, so let’s discuss. Thoughts welcome please!
Moving on to sound, the media reports today on the impact of degrading sexual lyrics on teenage sexual behaviour. The story was driven by a study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, which reported that from a sample of 711 teenagers, those who regularly listen to music with explicit/aggressive sexual phrases were twice as likely to be having sex. I’ve not read the paper so shouldn’t comment on the study design, but being a Psychology graduate, I would just raise a cautionary flag to correlation data as it is often used, yet denotes no real causality. It’s a useful approach for establishing levels of analysis, but I’d rather drill down to the neuropsychological level and establish if repeated exposure to explicit lyrics trains neural networks to respond to specific stimuli in a sexual way.
That’s not to say we should ignore this story – the proliferation of sex and aggression is massive in popular culture and must have an affect on the social fabric as a whole – a topic discussed only on Friday in the Aurora office. As pointed out by the lead researcher and reported on BBC Online, “Parents should be talking to their children about sex and putting these sorts of lyrics in context”, and this links back to the recent Aurora blog entry, “Scare tactics or softly softly?” and comments posted there – parents have a vital role to play but the way they communicate is important – teenagers won’t listen to judgment, they want realism. Perhaps we should leave it to the leaders of youth culture to steer the change? For example, whether you like him or not, Kanye West is delivering a new message via hip hop – he’s spoken out against issues as broad as the availability of HIV treatment and homophobia. At the end of the day, it all comes down to education: Aggressive lyrics, ‘gangsta’ posturing, unplanned pregnancies, unsafe sexual behaviour, avoiding health screenings etc. are by-products of failures in our educational systems, and failing to communicate to audiences in a way that connects with them.
Claire
25. Feb, 2009
You got me thinking, perhaps celebrities are the best way to mobilise people, and not just the teens. Look at what has happened to rates of cervical screening since Jade Goody was diagnosed with cervical cancer in August. Some places have seen more than a 20% increase in the number of smear tests since the news. Jade Goody, in ignoring an abnormal smear letter from her doctor, must have done more for cervical screening than any awareness campaign previously run by the NHS or anyone else. It looks like women are finally getting the message. Sadly, 3000 women are still getting cervical cancer each year, and 900 a year are dying as a result. The earlier the cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival. Still, around a third of women under 30 invited for screening do not go but the news yesterday that cervical cancer rates have halved due to screening should be all the proof women need to pay attention when that invitation arrives.