Proposition 3. The role of celebrities, politicians, media and the public itself
Based on this orientation towards the upcoming elections, we get the impression of an audience that is occupied with these elections. An audience that is aware of their vote and follows the news daily. But how do they follow this news? And how do they process this information?
A widely used model for information processing is the Elaboration Likelihood model by Petty & Cacioppo. They roughly assume that there are two ways to process information, consciously and unconsciously. They call the conscious way central processing and the unconscious peripheral. Media, celebrities and politicians themselves are always trying to get us into that central route. That we consciously process their information and come to a weighted stable choice and cast our vote on that basis.
The advantage of this is that it leads to lasting change in perceptions. The disadvantage is that we have to think about it consciously. The peripheral route unconsciously uses superficial cues to process information. That is much easier, but the disadvantage is that it leads to a lot of unstable change in perceptions.
Based on Trump's election, we suspect that for the vast hosptial ceos mailing list majority of the public, information about politics is processed peripherally. The fact that politicians are communicated about or what they themselves communicate is more important than what they say. We suspect that this is also due to the form that is often chosen to communicate about the most famous politicians. In addition, TV, after the news, is more suitable as a mass medium for peripheral messages.
Name a program, a medium and a celebrity, everywhere people choose satire and ridicule 'extreme' parties. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does ensure peripheral processing of the information. It is funny. If the intention was to make people change their minds for the long term, the form of satire is strategically the wrong choice.
In short: that there is communication is more important than what is communicated. Whether it is Lubach, Jan Jaap van der Wal at RTL Late Night, Rob Wijnberg in the NRC or with his own video clip, it is all entertainment and is processed as such. This may be intended for central processing, but you get peripheral processing.