Paul Responds with his Perspective

This was Paul's response to Reza which was posted in the original blog comments Sunday, January 20, 2008 10:10:00 PM.

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I'm not sure if the world is getting more complex, or I'm just paying more attention. Either way I agree that it appears more complex. For many people complexity acts as non-starter, a barrier-to-entry for critical thought, involvement and activism.

Clearly I'm not talking about you, but rather people that take a more dispassionate approach to our environment and their impact on it. I'd argue that this dispassionate group is a large majority of our population. Moreover, If we are ever going to get to a sustainable way of life, I'd argue that this population needs a catalyst to get them to start thinking about how their behavior impacts the rest of the world.

One of the things that impressed me most about The Story of Stuff was how they boiled down complex issues into relatively simple terms. I frequently see people present highly detailed and technically flawless information and have their message and goal go down in flames as a result of presenting at the wrong level of abstraction for their audience.

A challenge I often have is to boil down a complicated topic into something my audience will 1) listen to 2) relate to and 3) be willing to act on. Keeping in mind that the average (attentive) audience will only remember ~20% of anything presented, it is critical that I stay high enough up in scope that I don't bore or lose them. That often means sacrificing some of the detail and possible technical purity of the topic at hand.

With that in mind, when I consider The Story of Stuff as a catalyst for activating the public I'm impressed with it on several counts:

1. It manages to keep people's attention for ~20 minutes while sharing information unrelated to American Idol.
2. It boils down important and complicated topics in ways that are easily consumable by the majority of the population.
3. It does not provide a detailed solution, call out a specific boycott-able culprit or dictate a specific action , but rather encourages people to learn more and provides some resources to get them started. (This one is absolutely critical.)
4. It encourages discussion, debate and likely learning, even among people that know the specifics of some or all of the topics presented.
   

Its surprisingly difficult to craft a simple message about a complex topic with absolute regard to the purity of the subject matter. Being able to do so is what separates people like Einstein and Richard Feynman from the pack.

So when I look at The Story of Stuff, I judge it by how well it achieves its goal of engaging, educating and inspiring people. And rather than exploiting necessary simplifications and calling for specific actions, The Story of Stuff compensates for simplifications by encouraging its audience to learn more.

It takes a profound courage put an idea out to the public, dare people to ignore that idea, and then tell people they need to go learn if they want an answer to the challenge that idea raises. And even if the creators of this video are called out on the specifics and checkmated in a public battle of details and specifics they will have achieved their goal. They will have made people think.