 This video is about Chapter 2 Claimsmakers and Audiences from the book, Thinking about Social Problems, by Donalene Lowsky. And we will be summarizing the chapter for concepts that will be on your exam. So there are two topics in this chapter. One is taking a look at what are the best audiences to hear a social problems claim. And the other is who are the best spokespersons. And so we're going to take audiences first. So it is important to understand that choosing an audience for your social problems claim is important because not everybody who hears your message can or will be willing to do something about what you're asking them to do. So Lowsky goes into what she calls the hierarchy of audiences. And the principle behind this is that you want to pick an audience that will listen to you and that has the power to do something about your claim. So that means that one of the worst audiences that you could shoot for would be the general public because the general public has got a lot of different kinds of priorities and conflicting information. And they probably have the least amount of power to do anything. It takes an awful lot in social problems claims work to get a general audience to do what it needs to do in order to change society. You need a real groundswell from a general audience to, you know, a huge movement, if you will, in order for it to matter. Most of the time you want to pick an audience that has some authority over the problem that you are addressing. So in the hierarchy of audiences, she points out that you need to be able to have an audience that can be persuaded. Persuasion is an important part of the work that audiences are being asked to do. So you are trying to tell them a solution to a problem, and in telling them that solution to a problem, you are trying to get them to agree to the actions that you believe they should be taking. So if you are addressing a group of people who have already made up their minds and who are not open to persuasion, they are not as important of an audience as one that is open to persuasion. You also need an audience that has power. So you can, you know, preach to the choir all day long, but if they don't have the power to do anything about what you're talking to them about, then they are not going to be able, even if they are convinced by your arguments, to affect any kind of change. I mean, think about this. It's always going to be a question of power, because if a problem exists, and it could have been taken care of already, if people in power already cared about it, then that problem would have been addressed already and would go away. So always you are trying to convince somebody with power to do something different. There would not be a problem if people in power already cared about the problem that you are talking to them about. It would already be solved. So she points out that what you're asking audiences to do when you make a social problems claim is you are asking them to do work. You are asking them to consider and then take action. So if they are doing work, they have to draw upon particular resources in order to interpret, to be persuaded to use their power to change things. So what resources are available to an audience in order to do the work of an audience in the process of social problems claims? Well, for one thing you can appeal to and encourage them to draw upon their own practical experiences. In other words, when you are talking person to person to somebody in this audience, they have their personal lived experiences, and they can draw upon those lived experiences in order to understand the message that you're trying to get and to understand the action that you're asking them to take. There are also, as we've discussed before, social categories that can be drawn upon. So if you are talking to a particular audience and they have a particular status within society, you can, they can draw upon that status upon that social category that they belong to in order to be able to affect the actions that you're asking them to take. Social categories include things like your social status, the groups that you belong to, the kinds of understandings of who is being affected by this problem and who can do the most to change this problem. She points out that popular wisdom is part of what they're going to use to interpret what we are doing. This popular wisdom can include different sayings, norms, understanding of things and so forth. It is that sort of general knowledge that we all kind of think of as common sense that help us interpret things and think about things. So if I am, for instance, a good example of the best use of audience came from mothers against drunk driving. So mothers against drunk driving was an organization that actually started in the 1970s that wanted both judges and police officers to start enforcing the laws that were against people driving while under the influence of alcohol. Most people who know about mothers against drunk driving know it from their commercials in the late 80s and the efforts that they made to educate the public, but their first audience in the 1970s were police officers and judges. Now why were they police officers and judges? Because those are the people that were enforcing the laws. The laws were already on the books. But very often when somebody came before court, that judge probably had driven drunk at one point and understood that that kind of happens after a party and they would essentially let somebody off or give them an easy sentence because it was just understandable that you didn't mean it. That you were drunk and that you made a bad judgment call. And that was kind of popular wisdom at the time. In fact, if you look at old TV shows from the 60s and 70s, you often see the drunk as comic relief. It wasn't considered a serious problem. And if you would, the sensibilities that we have after all of these changes, we would look at those old shows and just cringe because here was somebody who had put lives in danger and instead of facing the consequences of putting people in danger. They were just, you know, laughed off and sent to jail for a night so that they could sleep it off and they'd get up the next morning and there were no real consequences. So one of the work of the audiences for the mothers against drug driving was to change that popular wisdom to change that idea of what it meant to drive drunk. Cultural themes are also a part of this. If you cultural themes are essentially the kind of words are sayings that we have that evoke certain emotions and feelings that everybody kind of gets. For instance, if you say freedom, a lot of people in the United States have an idea of what freedom means. And if you appeal to freedom or think about freedom, or talk about freedom, there is a certain theme that comes up about what freedom means and how important it is and so forth. So, these cultural themes help shape the thinking of audiences. And when spokesperson evoke those themes, it can send them off in a particular direction and being persuaded or using the power. So for instance, cultural themes with our example of mothers against drug driving were things like personal responsibility. So personal responsibility is a theme that comes up quite a bit in discourse. And they drew upon that theme as a way to convince authorities that they should hold people responsible for their actions. So cultural feelings kind of go along with these cultural themes. Basically, cultural feelings are what we think who deserves attention, who deserves help, who doesn't deserve sympathy and so forth. And one of the things that a mother's against drug driving got right is they very often evoke the cultural feelings of grieving. See, these were the members of this organization who went and spoke with these police officers and these judges were people who have lost someone to a drunk driver, either because they have been injured or killed at the hands of a drunk driver. And of course, telling your story and talking about the loss, especially a parent of losing a child will evoke a lot of cultural feelings like these people deserve more. These were innocent people who were hurt by these actions. So by evoking those cultural feelings, again, the audience begins to interpret what is being asked of them through the lenses of this sympathy and through the lenses of what they think is fair and just and not just dismissed, or as we said earlier, comic relief. So it's important when thinking about who the audience could be to understand what Lowsky calls social problems industries. What this means is that there are a lot of people who are employed in organizations and government agencies and so forth, whose job it is to address and correct and fix social problems. Industries are very much a potential place for people who are making social problems claims to make their claim. So, of course, one of the big social problems industries is government itself government at all levels of government makes social policy that policy is meant to address social problems. So if government agency that is in charge of a particular issue or a particular policy makes for a very good potential place to go and give your message because they have the power. And they are persuaded because they are supposed to be at least serving the citizens who are coming and petitioning them. There are organizational sponsors. There are all kinds of nonprofit organizations or businesses that have particular parts of their business that are dedicated to doing things about social problems. Some are more explicit, some are less explicit, but they are definitely in that social problems industry because they are involved in making changes that are supposed to improve society and improve particular issues. Educators, of course, are part of the social problems industry, not just sociology professors, but almost any kind of educator, including K through 12 preschooler and so forth, are going to address and give information out about particular problems. They may be more specific depending upon what their classroom situation is or what kind of discipline that they are a part of or whatever, but educators very often are involved in creating policy and assessing policy and in enacting policy and that makes them a good target for being an audience for social problems claim. Mass media, of course, when you can get the media involved and get them all excited about a particular issue or a particular social problems claim, that goes a long way to putting pressure on the people who are in power to do something about it. We've seen, again, using our example of mothers against drunk driving, once they develop chapters all over the country that had gone in and talked to police departments and had talked to judges and began to convince them to in fact create and enforce the laws that were already on the books to a certain extent. Regarding drunk driving, once they began doing this and started having some measure of success, then they turned to creating public service announcements and essentially created a meme that we all know which is don't drive drunk. And we often times or don't drink and drive is another saying, these are part of the power of mass media to create these small messages, these succinct messages that begin to change the way people think about a particular issue. And then a whole bunch of industries out there that deal with troubled people. This includes counselors, social workers, sometimes teachers and so forth, but it also includes like prisons and the court system and anything where if somebody is in trouble, you know, suit kitchens, community closets, food banks, all of these kinds of things are all part of the troubled person industries. Now a troubled person industry has a particular aspect to it. It is very individually oriented. In other words, it sees it, it sort of default is to see the problem as happening inside the person. It's about the so a person commits a crime or a person is homeless, or a person is hungry, or a person is ignorant or in need of an education. A person is illiterate. All of these kinds of things are always focused on the individuals that they are trying to help, but they are definitely interveners in social issues. And so they make for a good audience if you have particular kinds of social problems claims. So what motives to, you know, in order to understand how to persuade a particular audience, you have to understand what motivates that audience. And Loski talks about different kinds of motives that are frequently a part of the thinking and the work that an audience does. So one of the things that motivates a lot of people is subjective values. We talked a little bit about cultural themes and so forth, but these relate to values that audience members hold, and this will affect how they receive your message and what they think about the message that you're giving. There are also objective interests of profit motives, for instance, or wanting to get across like say your, your message lines up very much with things that they want to acquire or problems that they want to solve. So you can line up your objectives with their objectives and you can motivate them to make changes. Certainly mothers against drug driving did this to a certain extent because they appeal to subjective values, especially the value of life and that people were getting injured or killed. And they brought that to the forefront, but they also appeal to objective interest because judges and police officers want to be seen as enforcing the law as being true to the laws that is written. So by going to them and educating them on why it is important to enforce the law at a particular time, they appeal to and help to motivate them on the basis of this objective interest of meeting their function that is stated in their mission statements. Community emotions are basically appealing to a feeling on the part of the audience of being about something important, a sense of belonging, if you will. So if you can convince, like one of the things that mothers against drug driving did is they had local chapters all over the country, and they encouraged victims and families of victims of drunk driving to form these chapters. And as this movement became more widespread and had more and more people involved in it, there was this sense that if you don't change your mind, if you don't start acting in a particular way, you're going to be on the outside looking in. That this is something that the community needs, and therefore something that you want to be a part of that you have a sense of belonging. So this need to belong to something important, this sense of community can be very motivating and changing your mind and becoming more of a part of a particular movement, a particular effort to change and address the problem. So in addition to, we're going to switch a little bit here and talk about who's actually making these arguments. So you have the audience, which she addresses in the first part of the chapter and this audience is very important, because it is the, you know, these are the people that you're trying to make the decisions that need to become motivated to make the changes that you're trying to make. But who's going to talk to them. Who is going to be your spokesperson and that can be just as important, if not more so than the message, or the people that you're giving the message to. So she talks about credibility as being an important aspect of a spokesperson. They need to be seen as a valid credible source in the eyes of these audiences. So at the top of this hierarchy of credibility. She suggests scientists are like number one. So if you can get, if you're talking especially about medical issues or about particular kinds of technology issues, that kind of thing, then scientists are an important part of that message making. They are important spokesperson for that. And they often, because they are considered experts are considered highly credible. Of course, questioning the credibility of these scientists is part of what we see a lot going on right now in popular discourse. And so this can be argued out on the basis of their expertise, but also on the basis of whether or not they are credentialed, whether you know what their past history is what their expertise is so forth. So even though we're saying that this is a highly credible spokesperson, there are lots of ways in which that credibility can be questioned or diminished as they present the message. A good example of how this is not always workable has been climate change. So you have an incredible amount of scientists of the people who study climate change something like 97% of them say it's real and say it's man made and needs to be addressed by human beings in order to change it. But that credibility is doubted by a few people who have motives beyond just the credibility of the scientists. So oftentimes what gets debated is sort of my expert versus your expert, instead of talking about the message that is actually being given. And oftentimes also scientists have a lot of data that they present that can be kind of boring and unemotional, and that can create problems in trying to stir up and motivate people who are not scientists who are do not understand the numbers, or essentially get bored when they hear it. So scientists are a good, strong, credible spokesperson, but they are not always the best spokesperson, depending upon what you're trying to accomplish, who you're trying to persuade and who the audience is. Professionals are also part of it, you want somebody, you know, again, with an expertise and an understanding. Also, when you rely upon professionals, they very often are trained in the art of persuasion, and it is sort of their job to persuade. So being able to use people who are experts in a particular field in order to be a spokesperson can add credibility and can also add accessibility to the messaging that you have. And then of course victims are an excellent credible source. It is kind of hard to look at a victim and say you don't hurt or that doesn't mean anything or that's not good. Victims often are spokespersons. Going back to our example of mothers against drunk driving, you have the original spokespersons from mothers against drunk driving are just what the name implies. These are mothers who lost their children to drunk driving incidences. And they of course were telling their own stories, telling the pain that they went through telling the heartbreak that they went through because of this and that's a very powerful spokesperson when you're trying to convince people that there is a problem and that the problem needs to be solved in a particular way. But it is very important to understand that if you are using a victim as a spokesperson, that victim needs to be sympathetic. Children are regarded as never blamed for what goes what happens to them. They are essentially regarded as sort of a perfect victim because they are very sympathetic. And most of the time if they are victims, it is considered not their fault. They are innocent. You don't want to have as your spokesperson unsympathetic victims. So I'll give you an example of a case where this was important. There's an organization that I was aware of about 30 years ago that worked with men who have been arrested and convicted of child molestation. Most of these guys had molested a relative, either their own children or their nieces and nephews, etc. Not sympathetic victims at all. Even though the truth is that a lot of them did what they did because they had been victims themselves. That is not regarded by most people as an excuse for their behavior. But the work that was being done with them was very important because most child molesters have more than one victim. And if there is an organization that can intervene and heal them from that behavior, you essentially stop the cycle and stop victimization of future victims. So it's important work and they had very, they had a 0% recidivism. As in when these guys went through this program, they never hurt anybody again. And this program had been going on for about 20 years. Now it was very, very specific. They only took people who had been in jail, who had been jailed for what they did because they believed that that was. The best way to convince them that they had a problem. And they had very specific things that they did with these guys. Well, this professional who had to raise money to work with these men and molested children. Had to go out and give a sales pitch. And I guarantee you that when he went out and talked to people to give them to get them to support his program either going to. Well, he got a lot of funding through the court system, so he had to apply for grants and that kind of thing. But he also had contributors so occasionally had to go and give speeches and appeal to a crowd to write a check to support his work. Well, I can tell you that he never ever went in and said, these poor guys need your help. Because they were not sympathetic victims. They were unsympathetic people who were regarded by most people as villains. So what he did do when he wrote his grants or gave his appeal is talked about the children who were being saved by this program. Because there was zero recidivism. This meant that men who probably would have had more victims did not have any more victims. And as such, then one could argue that this program was essentially for those children protecting those potential victims from being victimized by these men. So that was a much more credible, you know, him as a mental health professional and talking to these people about children as victims was much more credible than if he had gone and said, look, I've made it possible for these men to live normal lives and they are much better people because of what I did. Nobody cares. Nobody cares what it did for these men that they do care that these men weren't hurting other people. So that's how that hierarchy of credibility works. So, when we consider these experts, these scientists, the victims and so forth, we need to think in terms of which categories of people actually get involved in making claims and losky points out that there are three major groups of people who become claims makers. Activists are obvious most of the time social problems are being addressed and social problems claims are being made by people who are interested in actively changing problems within society so they have an activist bent. Scientists, of course, especially when you're looking at technology and climate change, medical issues and so forth. They often find themselves propelled into the position of being claims makers. And of course, mass media has all kinds of spokespersons who are claims makers and this brings up the question of celebrities, because there are a lot of celebrities who get on to mass media and talk about particular causes and particular social problems. Sometimes they present themselves the celebrities present themselves as victims, as people who have experienced these problems. And sometimes they are spokespersons who are particularly interested in a cause. Why are celebrities good claims makers? Well, because they get the attention of mass media. If you want to get a message out and you want people to listen to that message, you know, and somebody like Angelina Jolie gets up there and starts talking, people show up and start writing what she's saying. So when she's the spokesperson for UNICEF, for instance, people are interested in what she's saying, not because she's a particular expert on it, but because she's a celebrity and people want to know what's going on. So these claims makers, according to Lowsky, are important because they have some credibility, because they get some attention, because they are persuasive to the audiences. And of course, picking the claims maker is important, depending upon the social problem that you're trying to address. So if you're addressing a social problem that doesn't have a lot to do with technology or medicine, having a scientist stand up and talk about it may not be all that convincing. Whereas if you're addressing a problem that requires lots of support from the public, then, you know, a celebrity might be important. But if you're, you know, if you sent a celebrity to the police departments to talk about drunk driving, it wouldn't have been as powerful as sending the activists who have, who were victims themselves, who had experienced this. So the successful social problems claim matches the claims maker with the audience, so that the audience will be convinced by the person and their credibility who is giving them the message. So that is where a lot of social problems claims fall down. You think that because you have a celebrity who is on your side that somehow you're going to get the right audience, but in fact what you get is either just mass media or the general public. And the general public is very fickle. The general public, you know, I'll give you an example in 2009, everybody was all freaking out about the Iranian election and it was all over social media and lots of people are talking about it and it was trending on Twitter. And then Michael Jackson died. And now all of a sudden we don't care about foreign politics anymore. All we care about is, you know, the king of pop has passed away. So there is lots of things that compete for the attention of the general public. And if you are trying to make changes, the general public is not necessarily your best audience. So again, what was he is pointing out is that picking the right audience and matching that with the right claims maker goes a lot. Those is part of what makes social problems claims work successful, meaning people listen and people consider and start working, giving their time, their money, their effort for your cause. And if you don't do that well, then what you end up with is it falling flat or not really being successful and getting people's attention or getting the attention of the right people that you need. So the last part of this, so that word enumeracy is a word that is like illiteracy. It means the inability to understand the implications of numbers to understand what numbers mean. When people are making social problems claims, they very often use official statistics. There are lots of agencies in the government. There are lots of universities and institutions that collect data and publish that data and publish reports on that data that help understand a problem, the depth and breadth of a problem and so forth. But the thing to remember about official statistics is that statistics like anything else are products of the social world. That is, there is a decision somewhere that has been made that we want to collect information on a and we're ignoring B. Now, what this means is that even official statistics which seem very objective can be subjective because they are biased towards the status quo. In other words, what we collect information on got determined by the world that we live in, not necessarily the world that we want to live in. And so we have a problem from the very beginning of data collection because the powers that be are usually the ones who determine which data is kept and which data is ignored or it may be that they just don't even think about things other than what they want to collect information on. So that's one problem with using numbers to make your claim before audiences. The other is that people have very different responses to numbers and these responses are not always logical or well informed when the numbers are presented to them. Sometimes, especially if you look at how numbers are presented, audiences can be offstrucked by these numbers. I'll give you an example. There's been a lot of discussion in the last couple of decades about the problem with children developing type 2 diabetes before the age of 18. And you can go and find people who are presenting these statistics and they collect the incidences of the number of people who are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes before the age of 18. And there are ways to present these numbers. So the data, if I recall correctly, was that in the first decade of the century, we went from an incident of .0125% of children under the age of 18. Now that's less, that's one one hundredth of a percent understanding how rare that is. They were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes under the age of 18 and then by the end of the first decade around 2010, that number had gone up to .025. Still very rare, but it got reported as there is twice as much diabetes than there was before. As if this was a trend, and by saying twice as much, it sounds drastic and horrible. Whereas, you know, if you looked at the data, that increase probably came from the fact that they started testing kids under the age of 18 for type 2 diabetes. That probably was explained more because people were making the diagnoses now, not because there were more children who were actually experiencing it, but because they used a percentage instead of using the actual number. It creates a more awestruck and freak out kind of aspect to it. We're going to talk about formula stories and upcoming chapters, but that kind of awestruck number attempt to make the numbers sound as drastic and incredible as possible is part of this enumeracy. A part of people don't ask questions beyond they just hear that it doubled or, you know, it's 200% more than it used to be and they're just become awestruck by it. Lots of people are naive. They think that numbers don't lie and they don't understand how numbers are presented and because they're not educated in it, they very often respond to numbers like, okay, that sounds good and they don't really question them or evaluate them. There are people who are cynical. They believe that our numbers lie and they very often doubt anything when somebody starts giving them statistics about things. Of course, there are people who are capable of being critical when they understand these numbers. And those people very often are far and few between that when an audience engages in that kind of critical response to the numbers that you're giving, the spokesperson has to be very versed in what they are talking about and have to be able to respond to these responses by explaining the numbers and making the audience, helping the audience to understand the implications of these numbers. So basically this chapter is going over this process between the people who receive the message and the people who tell the message. And this is an important beginning in looking at Loski's framework because this is where very often the messaging of groups that want to make a difference break down. They either pick the wrong audience or they pick the wrong spokesperson or they fail to persuade the audience and motivate the audience when they present this information. And that's the end of the notes for chapter two.