The quickest and most obvious solution to achieving the shift in our values is through the key elements that design our thought patterns today—the media and the internet. To change the social mindset, we need to change the discourse in the media. As we demonstrated above, if the media were to tell us that giving, sharing, and collaborating were good, we would think so, too, and would gladly follow suit.
But in today’s reality, our egos are boosted, self-entitlement is rewarded, and manipulative people are given the positive moniker of “Go-getter.” It is hardly surprising that those who are not selfish and mean at school tend to be labeled as “dorks” or “weak.” It is also not surprising that with such an influx of socially negative messages, police officers must be placed in every elementary school in Texas, for example, not to keep dangerous adults away, but to keep dangerous children away, and even arrest some of them at age 6! And not just one or two, but 300,000 children in 2010 alone, and just in that one state [56].
Entertaining TV does not have to mean violent or self-entitlement-promoting shows. It is quite possible to produce entertaining, high-quality TV that contains prosocial messages. Investigative journalism can expose not only corruption, but also show how we all depend on each other, and how only together we can succeed. The media can introduce communities and initiatives where such concepts are being implemented, such as the town of Marinaleda in Spain, as presented in The New York Times’ inspiring story, “A Job and No Mortgage for All in a SpanishTown.” [57]
The media can then discuss to what extent such efforts are successful, to what extent and how they improve our lives, and how applicable such initiatives are in different parts of the world.
The bottom line is that the public discourse needs to change, and when it does people will change their views and the media will change its content to suit the public discourse. But the change must begin with a conscious effort, as the current trend of the media is anti-social rather than prosocial.
Also, today a social change doesn’t have to begin at the top, on a prime time, high-profile TV show on the most popular channels. It can just as successfully be a grassroots movement with a few enthusiasts who join to form a social movement that will be promoted through the internet. This is precisely how the OWS movement began.
Social media outlets such as Facebook and YouTube allow anyone with just a little bit of drive and gumption to promote any idea they wish—good or bad—and create enough buzz around it to gather a critical mass of prosocial ideas. As we will see below, it takes a small, determined minority to make a quick, big, and decisive change.
Alongside the various media outlets, there is the good old word-of-mouth circulation. Ideas spread best by simply talking about them—at home, at work, with friends, on online forums, and through social networks. Simply telling people what you believe is right will get them thinking.
“Nothing beats coming up with a product so interesting that people just can’t help talking about it. Nothing is better than customers taking it upon themselves to support a business that they just love,” writes marketing consultant, Andy Sernovitz, in his book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, Revised Edition [58].
There is even a more latent side to the spreading of ideas. They can spread far and wide by people simply thinking about or wanting certain things. On September 10, 2009, The New York Times published a story titled, “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” by Clive Thompson [59]. In his story, Thompson describes a fascinating experiment performed in Framingham, Massachusetts. In the experiment, details of the lives of 15,000 people were documented and registered periodically over fifty years. Professors Nicholas Christakis’ and James Fowler’s analysis of the data revealed astonishing discoveries about how we affect one another on all levels—physical, emotional, and mental—and how ideas can be as contagious as viruses.
In their celebrated book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives— How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do, Christakis and Fowler established that there was a network of interrelations among more than 5,000 of the participants. Christakis and Fowler discovered that in the network, people affected each other and were affected by each other not just in social issues, but with physical issues, as well.
“By analyzing the Framingham data,” Thompson wrote, “Christakis and Fowler say they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors—like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy—pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors—clusters of friends appeared to ‘infect’ each other with obesity, unhappiness, and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.” [60]
Even more surprising was the researchers’ discovery that these infections could “jump” across connections. They discovered that people can affect each other even if they do not know each other! Moreover, Christakis and Fowler found evidence of these effects even three degrees apart (friend of a friend of a friend). In Thompson’s words, “When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing… it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese—even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.” [61]
Quoting Professor Christakis, Thompson wrote, “In some sense we can begin to understand human emotions like happiness the way we might study the stampeding of buffalo. You don’t ask an individual buffalo, ‘Why are you running to the left?’ The answer is that the whole herd is running to the left.” [62]
But there is more to social contagion than watching one’s weight or heart condition. In a televised lecture, Professor Christakis explained that our social lives (and hence much of our physical lives, judging by the previous paragraphs) depend on the quality and strength of our social networks and what runs through the veins of that network. In his words, “We form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I were always violent toward you ... or made you sad ... you would cut the ties to me and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things like love, and kindness, and happiness, and altruism, and ideas. ...I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness, and what I think the world needs now is more connections.” [63]