Will you be Sharing this Blog post? It's AWE-some!

Apologies for the lame post title, but I'm going somewhere with it, I promise. It's heavily inspired by the New York Times story I stumbled across yesterday while procrastinating on my homework: Will you be emailing this article? It's awesome.
, so I blame them for the abrasive, yet seemingly effective title.

As the article elaborates, we may be one step closer to understanding what information is shared electronically, thanks to some very interesting research just released by the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers spent over 6 months collecting data (at 15' intervals!) regarding what articles were most frequently shared--via email or blogging--and analyzing them for common themes.

So, what do they have in common? Are they happy or sad? Gossip-laden or scientific? Informational or descriptive? As it turned out, the strongest predictor of whether or not an article would be shared was it's AWE-someness. As in, it's ability to inspire awe, an emotion defined by investigators as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.” Scientific articles also performed significantly better than non-scientific articles.

So, that was somewhat of an aside, but not really, since unlocking the key to what information is shared among social networks via electronic media is pretty central to Communication. As I read it, I found myself applying it to what we discussed in class, as well as the articles.

For example, of the commercials we watched in class, the one I found to be most memorable and likely to inspire action was the Livestrong Foundation one that featured the various cancer survivors. Their determination and commitment to fighting such a powerful disease was amazing, and certainly matched up with th "feeling of admiration in the face of something greater than self" that the authors of the study described. Does the "awe technique" transcend written articles to tv campaigns?

Also interesting was the heavy emphasis on scientific articles. Is this a function of the NYT readership, or can it be applied more broadly to the general population? In the Obregen reading, I found the proposed idea that educating people about the HIV viral transmission of AIDS was ineffective because it increased the disparity between "the information haves and have-nots", a tough idea to swallow. I understand that this bit of scientific information needs to be tailored to the group, but generally speaking, I believe that people are empowered by knowledge and understanding lays the foundation for long term behavior change.

In terms of our group project, if we can "just" harness the awe-factor of sports, know that we will be successful in our attempts to increase the PA of these middle schoolers! Now, that's AWESOME.