THE RIPPLE PRINCIPLE
by Antonio C. Antonio
April 22, 2014
How do we make something patently unpopular
popular?
Advocacies are often met with difficulties
and challenges as they are not the “in” things… and are not too popular either
because, more often than not, they dwell on controversial matters and issues
which are not part of people’s day-to-day conversation. Although largely regarded as important, there
is still less attention and concern for them.
Popularizing advocacies remains to be the single-biggest and most
important hurdle advocates will have to face up to and leap over.
There are no set rules, procedures nor
patterns in popularizing advocacies.
Whatever works well to individual advocacies are normally followed and
adopted as strategies. The underlying
consideration will be and only be the effectiveness of transferring information
from one individual to another. Towards
this end, I could only recommend “The Ripple Principle.” A “ripple effect” is a condition wherein
water will form ripples and such ripples form circular waves that increase in
circumference as they move outwards. The
initial catalyst of such action comes from an object being dropped in the body
of water and the subsequent waves this produces grow incrementally as they move
outwards. An increase in the number of
objects dropped in the body of water will cause more waves and agitation.
How could “The Ripple Principle” apply to advocacies? Let’s consider the following parallelisms:
- The “body of water” could represent people;
- The “object” could represent the advocacy being dropped in the “body of water” or the consciousness of people; and,
- The “ripples” are the pieces of information about a particular advocacy that are transferred from person to person.
Like most advocacies, an environmental
advocacy remains largely misunderstood which is the sum effect of the lack of
knowledge and awareness among the populace.
Advocacies could only be successful when enough meaningful knowledge and
information is successfully communicated, understood and appreciated, and
internalized by a majority of the populace.
Information dissemination, therefore, remains to be a big challenge and
sustaining this flow of information (because of logistical considerations) is
the bigger challenge. But advocacies
could also be inexpensive. It probably
was a nightmare before but with the advent of advances in telecommunications
and information technology, popularizing advocacies are easier nowadays. But another critical element to the success
of advocacies is the commitment of advocates to their chosen advocacies. The Internet and social media (Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, blogging, etc.) has improved our communications ability and
has given us better access to a greater number of people too.
Even when access to media (broadcast and
social) is not present, advocacies could still be pursued on a personal
level. But how
will this work? We should be aware that
we actually have varying circles of influence:
- Our immediate family;
- Our relatives and close friends;
- Our classmates, co-workers and business associates; and,
- Our peripheral acquaintances.
Just my little thoughts…
No comments:
Post a Comment