This is the fifth
post in my attempt to hierarchize media uses according to a utilitarian rubric. My first four posts
dealt with James Cameron’s Avatar, Marcel Duchamp’s The Fountain, Homer’s The Odyssey, and Ludovico Einaudi’s Primavera. In this post, I examine the
Idle No More movement.
Idle No More is a recent
movement started by the First Peoples of Canada in protest against offenses by
the Canadian government against the indigenous. Some core values promoted by
the movement are equality, indigenous rights, and the preservation of the
environment.
The movement was
launched toward mainstream media attention when Attawapiskat Chief Theresa
Spence went on a liquid diet hunger strike as a reaction against legislative
abuses of indigenous treaty rights by the Canadian government. Idle No More
relied heavily on social media to coordinate stunts such as flash mobs in
various cities around Canada.
The most obvious
criticism of using Idle No More as an example of a media use is that it is
unfair to compare a movement to an individual work. I disagree. The point of
these case studies is not to determine which 2-hour experience will help your
life more. It’s to determine how a media producer ought to spend one’s time.
James Cameron began working on Avatar
15 years before the film was released and the film was his major focus from
2005 to 2009. The creators of Idle No More likely had to invest far less total
hours and money into their product than the producers of Avatar invested into theirs. This is what makes the two comparable.
Comparisons should
not be limited to works with matching Strength of Impact. Nor should
comparisons be made only after adjusting SoI so that both products are equal –
that defeats the purpose of making comparisons. My goal is to answer the
question: if a media producer is to choose a project to invest years of effort
into, which project will provide the greatest good for the lowest cost?
Strength of Impact:
- How many people does the project reach?
- How significantly does it impact the people it reaches?
- How likely are the people it impacts to spread this impact?
- How long lasting is its impact?
- How grave was the issue pre-impact?
My answers:
- High
- Medium
- High
- Medium
- Medium
Explanation:
Idle No More has by far the greatest SoI I’ve looked at so far despite
sharing the usual SoI-1 rating. There are three main reasons for its superior
SoI:
- It impacts people’s beliefs and values
- It motivates people to mobilize themselves politically and convert others
- It targets a marginalized, rather than a privileged, group of people
Similarly to The Fountain, a social movement like
Idle No More attempts to change people’s minds about a subject. But unlike The Fountain, Idle No More is very
explicit about what it stands for and what it wants to accomplish. It also
demands that those who agree take action and contribute to the cause. These
people are then highly motivated to convince those around them to support Idle
No More’s values or to get involved in the movement. None of this can be said
for any of the works of art and entertainment I’ve formally looked at thus far.
Further, Idle No
More is not a movement that provides middle class Westerners with a fun
experience. It specifically targets a marginalized group of people that
actually has something valuable at stake. While I do not think the answer to
SoI-5 is morally relevant, I have found that it is a good heuristic for identifying
causes likely to make a big difference in the world. This is a position Toby
Ord labels Weak Practically-Negative Utilitarianism.
Quality of Impact:
- How much does it increase the accuracy of people's models of reality?
- How much does it improve people's quality of life?
- How much more likely does it make people to act altruistically toward others?
My answers:
- 0
- +2
- +1
Explanation:
Idle No More is similarly the media
use I’ve evaluated with the highest QoI.
This is for some of the same reasons
that make the movement high-impact. It targets rights violations that threaten
to hurt people’s standards of wellbeing and it motivates people to act so as to
prevent those violations and promote some good values.
I didn’t give the movement any credit
for QoI-1 as I think the movement’s merits lie primarily in its ability to
mobilize people toward solving a social issue, rather than in its ability to
educate people or make them much wiser. I also do not accept all of Idle No
More’s values. For instance, fetishizing the preservation of the environment is
inconsistent with my ethical views. There are many hypothetical instances in
which hurting the environment would be preferable for human and animal flourishing.
Idle No More is by
far the most effective media use I’ve looked at thus far. In the future, I’m
going to continue relying on my heuristic of choosing projects to score high on
SoI-5. I expect future case studies to confirm my intuition that that question
is a good indicator of media effectiveness. I’m also looking for projects that
score low on SoI-1 as I haven’t taken a look at any yet.
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