PBB is released…and the meme struggles to get past my mother
Okay, folks — PBB has been released! The trick now is to get the meme propagating.
One of the most interesting questions in memetics is the variable rate of propagation. In other words, why does one idea get passed around like a giggle at a slumber party, while another spreads haltingly, inefficiently — like a giggle at a funeral?
Take the Ashley Flores story, an email launched in May 2006 to help find a girl who was somehow abducted in Philadelphia despite the fact that she doesn’t exist.
At one point, the urban legend site Snopes.com was receiving 25,000 inquiries per day about this story. And that’s just the people who actually cared enough to try to find out if it was true — surely a tiny percentage indeed. Nearly a year later, the Ashley Flores hoax is still the #1 forwarded email message in the U.S., hitting several hundred thousand inboxes a day and rebounding effortlessly into several hundred thousand more.
Why? Because it speaks to our deepest fears, gives us an opportunity to do good with little effort, and includes a photo of an attractive, happy young teenage girl. Unfortunately, those are the characteristics that trigger our compassion and get the meme spreading like [insert simile here], a fact the Onion neatly satirizes here.
This is relevant to the book, by the way. Be patient.
How fast does a forwarded email spread? Suppose I send the Ashley Flores hoax to 20 friends at 8 am, and each of them forwards to 20 more one hour later, and the forwarding continues at that rate, every hour on the hour.
At 8 am, 20 people have the message.
At 9 am, 400 people have the message.
At 10 am, 8,000 people.
At 11 am, 160,000 people.
At noon, we’re up to 3.2 million.
At this rate, by the time I clock out at 5 pm, a hypothetical 10.2 trillion people are looking for a nonexistent, non-missing girl. That’s 900 messages for every man, woman and child who has ever lived. I just filled Genghis Khan’s inbox with crap! That should slow down the conquest of Asia Minor a bit.
Fortunately, even a meme that pushes all the right buttons doesn’t have that rate of success. Let’s say I send the Ashley message to 20 friends, but only one in four continues to forward it to twenty friends, and so on — a mere 25% rate of success per round:
At 9 am, 100 people have the message.
At noon, 62,500 people have the message.
Pfft. Sixty-two thousand people? Hardly worth getting out of bed. But not to worry: Before I get back into bed tonight, 6.1 billion people will have received the message. That’s everybody.
Compare this, now, to a meme without the pushbutton advantages of the Ashley message — one that asks us to think, for example, or make an effort of some kind, or one that challenges our preconceptions. Or suggests that you can raise ethical, caring kids without religion. Something like that.
Let’s do the math on this one. I recently forwarded an announcement about the book’s release to twenty close friends and family — including my mother, a very sharp, non-conforming secular humanist of whom I am immensely proud.
The next day she replied: I’ve gone through my entire address book, and I just can’t find a single person that I can send the announcement to!
She is concerned, of course, about the reaction from the next layer. Even though the book advocates co-existence and religious literacy and all sorts of other good and noble things, the very idea of living without religion has been anathematized so successfully over the millennia that the very idea causes some people to shut down. But — and here’s the thing — I think we tend to grossly overestimate the number of such people in the next layer.
Back to our memetic calculus. Given the fact that the woman who carried the author in her womb for nine months and who shares his worldview entirely forwarded his book announcement to no one… well, let’s calculate the likely success rate of this email meme:
At 8 am, 20 people will have received the message.
At 9 am, 20 people will have received the message.
Six months later, 20 people will have received the message.
This, for those of you without a calculator, is a slower rate of propagation. Because we tend to forward e-memes only to those whose worldview is reinforced by the message, ideas that challenge us to see the world in a different way tend to die on the vine.
Lest I’m being too subtle: Why not make a stop at the PBB home page and use the Tell a Friend feature to send the link around to twenty people? Just skip my mother.
The cover
- April 04, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In PBB
2
I first saw the cover when it appeared on Amazon in January, then helped myself to a massive coronary. It looked like praying hands, oh my gourd, oh my gourd, they put a pair of praying hands on my book. Well of course they did, it’s about parenting without religion, why wouldn’t they put an overtly religious symbol on the cover?
I gaped at the screen, paralyzed, for a good ten minutes. At last I shook myself to consciousness and clicked to enlarge the image…
…at which point the hands of two different people, a parent and a child, became clear. It evokes prayer, sure, but it isn’t prayer. Once you see the two different hands, it can’t be. I was suddenly flooded with meanings: tenderness, humility, love, two people turning to each other in the absence of a god, with meaning and mystery undiminished, empathy for the religious impulse — even a high five! It becomes a Rorschach test, a reflection of our own assumptions. It is thought-provoking and complex. It’s brilliant. And I would never, ever have chosen it. I’d have chosen something weaker, paler, less rich. I’m glad I was kept out of the room.
But I knew there’d be a mixed reaction, and boy howdy. I immediately contacted ten contributors for their reactions. The very first one called it “a disastrous mistake” and said “please, please get it changed.” A second message came in as I was finishing the first: “I dislike the image of hands intensely,” s/he said, “It is very misleading.”
I took a generous second helping of heart attack. I was apparently alone in my opinion that the image was brilliant.
But then the rest started coming in. Powerful and thought-provoking, said one. I love it — the meaning changes as you look, and best of all, as you THINK, said another. Inspired, filled with multiple meanings, said another.
Two more came in solidly against. One was concerned that Christians would think they were being satirized. Hmm. I sent the image to 45 people, including several Christian friends, and the response was encouraging: better than 3-to-1 in favor of the image, across the board.
Most important of all: those who opposed it almost always did so (in a pattern becoming quite familiar now) out of concern about the reactions of others.
I screwed up my courage and sent the image to Richard Dawkins. His reply, twenty minutes later, was simply this: I can’t see what the fuss over the cover is about. I think it is quite a nice cover. What is the problem with it?
I breathed an enormous sigh of relief, knowing that Richard’s approval would calm the concerns of many others. It is rather hilarious to see how often we freethinkers are just as prone to follow our own herd or sit in thrall of our more prominent fellows. And don’t think for a moment I’m excluding myself from this critique. I too saw my own doubts about the cover melt away once Sir Richard weighed in. Silly species.
As usual, Python gets it just right:
Yes. We are all individuals.
The tale of the title
- April 03, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In PBB
- 0
It comes as a surprise to most people to learn that authors rarely choose the titles of their books. That’s often a good thing. Margaret Mitchell’s first title for Gone With The Wind was Ba! Ba! Black Sheep— including the exclamation marks, I kid you not one bit. Roots was Before This Anger. Tolstoy thought All’s Well That Ends Well was a better title than War and Peace. Worst of all, Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened. Imagine a book in which something happens. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was once Tipsy, The Wonder Kitten, and Treasure Island was originally titled The Sea-Cook. And I only made one of those up.
My first choice for the title of PBB was Secular Parenting. I get an attack of the yawning fantods now that I think of it, but there it was. When the publisher said a titling committee (!) would be re-titling my book, I was mostly concerned we’d end up with something far worse — either Raising God-Spurning Christmockers, or, on the other end, a title that said nothing at all: Parenting That Happens. They were dead-set on making a change because they’d Googled “Secular Parenting” and the very first site that pops up is this one. Heh.
I decided to come up with a new title so good that the committee couldn’t pass it up. After a week of cogitatin’, inspired by the unbeatable Camp Quest motto (“It’s Beyond Belief!”), I came up with Parenting Beyond Belief. And they bought it. How could they not. It evokes all the right things.
Not everyone thought so. One contributor was adamant that it be changed back, thought it looked like an attempt to downplay the focus, or worse, to “pass” as a general parenting book. I didn’t think so, and most people have found the title clever, positive and inviting. Since I stole two of the three words, I can agree with them without blushing.
The cover was a different story. Tune in next time.
So…who’s your Russ?
Let me introducing you to Russ:
Russ is a theology prof and a dear friend of mine who represents for me all that is good and noble in the faithful. He is a force for good in the world, a kind, gentle and admirable man. If all believers were like Russ, I’d be thrilled. They’re not, of course, but neither is he unique. And whenever I find myself ready to make a categorical statement about the faithful, Russ’s face pops up before me — and he usually looks plenty hurt, because he himself rarely deserves what I’m serving up.
Russ complicates my life in a good way. I’m convinced he’s got it factually wrong, and that he, like most moderate believers, does too little to acknowledge the genuine harm that religion does, but he is a deeply good guy. As a result of knowing Russ, and dozens like him, I avoid generalizations. I cannot oppose an idea just because it is Christian. I’m forced to actually look at it and think about it, to assess it on its merits, because it may be just as good as Russ. I still make critiques — boy howdy, do I — but they are smarter, more accurate, and more on-target because of Russ. I paint just as vividly, but with a narrower brush. That’s a very good thing.
Russes work both ways — all ways. A Russ is someone you know and love who is on the opposite side of any line of difference. The Cheneys got themselves a Russ when their daughter came out as a lesbian. Those Christians who might be angry at the inclusion of a PBB review in their favorite parenting magazine would be opposing something without thinking, just because it is associated with disbelief. I’d guess they don’t have a Russ on that issue, someone they know who would make it tougher to hate and fear nonbelievers indiscriminately. They need to know a good, decent atheist. Fortunately there are millions of them. Of us, I mean.
And they probably already do know some, of course — but the irony is that the very same hatred and fear that can be cured by knowing each other keeps us from revealing ourselves. And on spins the wheel. Once you know a “gay Russ,” why, it’s a hell of a lot harder to hate and fear gays. Same with a black Russ or an Iraqi Russ. Slurs and stereotypes start sticking in the throat. This is why it’s so important for members of marginalized groups to be out.
One of the purposes of the book is to normalize disbelief so that, in the future, everyone will have an atheist Russ in their lives. At which point a book on secular parenting might get about the same reception as one on vegetarian parenting. Parenting Beyond Beef, perhaps.
I’m the humanist/atheist Russ in the lives of many Christians I know. I complicate things for them. My face floats before them and they put away the broad brush. So, nonbelievers: Do you have a Russ? And believers, how about you? I’m available. We won’t always agree, but who needs that? If we can just keep each other’s humanity in sight, we’ll do fine.
Too hot the buzz?
After working for months to generate excitement about the book, the buzz is now beginning to freak me out. Just a bit. Expectations are so high across the board, it’s slightly terrifying. What will the other monkeys say when they discover it’s nothing but word scrambles and sudoku?
I give a portion of my book profits to various good and noble causes. For Calling Bernadette’s Bluff it was the National Center for Science Education and Doctors Without Borders. I’ve decided a portion of PBB profits will go to the most amazing organization I’ve ever been involved with: Nonviolent Peaceforce, an NGO that trains unarmed civilian peacekeeping teams and sends them to conflict zones around the world — currently Sri Lanka and Mindanao (Philippines), soon Colombia and Uganda. They work with local groups to build and sustain nonviolent strategies for conflict resolution. I’m their US communications coordinator at the moment, just an interim position, and I don’t want to tell them until I leave in May, so please don’t put it on the Internet or anything…
Just heard from the book’s publicist at Amacom that they’re having a very tough time getting parenting magazines to review the book. One editor after another claims s/he’s really really interested in the idea him or herself, but too concerned that a review would anger Christian subscribers into cancelling their subscriptions.
I couldn’t help thinking of a time, not too long ago, when periodicals would reject stories by or about African Americans for fear of angering white readers. I can just hear the editors at the time saying, “I think it’s a fine idea myself, but…” Saying such a thing today would be considered outrageous, but it’s still fine and dandy to accept or even promote bigotry against nonbelievers.
One invited contributor — thankfully only one — declined the offer to participate for the same reason. She is an agnostic, but also a prominent author of books for children, and said she simply couldn’t risk the potential backlash from religious parents. “I don’t need the controversy,” she said. He or she.
Now: It seems important to note that they’d surely be hearing from only a small minority of their religious readers. Most religious folks are just as sane and tolerant as you and I. I say this with confidence, having known countless Christians who are among the finest people I am likely to meet. And I use just one of them to shame myself whenever I pull out the broad brush. But that’s fodder for another post.
Googling for relevance
- March 28, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In PBB
- 7
Once PBB is released, the Amazon rank can give us some idea of the audience we’ve found. For now I can assess interest in the book by Googling the title in quotes to see how many sites mention it. I’ve done this twice a month since November, with the following results:
Date…….Google hits
01 Nov 2006 — 7 hits
15 Nov 2006 — 24
01 Dec 2006 — 30
15 Dec 2006 — 33
01 Jan 2007 — 49
15 Jan 2007 — 125
01 Feb 2007 — 602
Well helloooo there, relevance.
There’d been no real advertising at this point, but I’d sent a preliminary announcement to 300 freethought groups in the US on January 23. Two days later I thought I’d check again:
03 Feb 2007 — 9,970 hits
Ooh, didja see that?! I’m not ashamed to say I wet myself with delight. (Okay, I am ashamed.) I’m seriously concerned about the millions of unserved secular parents out there, but I also have the usual pathetic need for the approval of my fellow monkeys:
Writers are especially prone to seek out the hoo-hoo-hoos of our fellows. I started checking Google once a week, watching the meme spread like a middle-aged gut:
10 Feb 2007 — 13,300
17 Feb 2007 — 14,600
The real excitement here is that my rash promises to the publisher (i.e. that an inestimably large and hitherto untapped audience of millions of secular parents is indeed out there, dying to be tapped) were apparently true. As for me, I’m just a servant of that readership. The Googling does nothing for me personally. I could quit anytime. Really.
Okay okay, just one more toke:
27 Mar 2007 — 24,400
Aaahhhhhh, that’s the stuff. How about you: wanna hit?
