Discus Sion

Well, turns out students aren’t naturally loquacious in a tutorial-discussion environment. Who knew?
It’s an interesting line, anyway. This second-year paper is basing its lab programme around a set of linked assignments, which ask students to undertake a small group action with an environmental focus and pay attention to their experience. We’re looking at how easy or hard it is to get changes in behaviour, the kinds of barriers that are really problematic vs. those that are just nuisances, the relationships between degree of motivation and degree of success, and so on and so forth. Lots of nice meaty social psychology stuff. Still, the opening two assignments and the first two labs are heavy environmental-studies crash courses – getting to grips with climate change via Inconvenient Truth, the Stern report, the IPCC report…
So the discussions today were about the Inconvenient Truth doco, and how people responded to it, and what people got out of it or questioned about it. There was a lot of interesting stuff that came out. As we’d hoped, people seemed to have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the general issues – the cultural prevalence of climate change concern hasn’t passed these guys by. There was a lot of cynicism about Gore, his political angle and the emotive way his message was portrayed, but there was also overwhelming agreement with the message he was delivering. Of course, people also acknowledged that Gore’s political angle gave him the connections and status needed to make this film a cultural phenomenon, and that the emotive stuff was needed to keep an audience engaged, so… the complexities of this kind of message-making were definitely appreciated. That was quite cool.
There were also a few nice moments where lots of people would talk enthusiastically about, say, how hard it is to craft a message that gets people to actually change their behaviour; or how you need to change attitudes before anything else but even that doesn’t always help; or how it is really hard to act alone when it seems the people around you aren’t also on board… And then with their next breath, ask me how all of this environmental stuff relates to social psychology. Heh.
Anyway, it was a solid and encouraging stepping stone towards the actual action stuff, which is what kicks in next. All quite exciting really.
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The rise and rise of Facebook continues. Whatever started that explosion a couple months back, it shows no sign of slowing – every time I let Facebook check through my email address book, another ten people have signed up. It ain’t perfect – the place is swimming in weird little applications that just don’t scratch my itch – but I’m feeling a lot more confident than I was at the start of June about predicting that Facebook will survive when other social networking systems will collapse. Latest development is a signup from Public Address’ Damian Christie, who writes about hearts being broken over here.