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It’s the holiday season which seems to make a lot of people think about beliefs. I’m thinking about this great book on my desk entitled Communication Planning: An Integrated Approach by Sherry Devereaux Ferguson and reading the section on understanding the psychology of audiences (Chapter 7).

Citing social psychologist Milton Rokeach the book outlines five belief types:

• Type A - Worldview beliefs: These beliefs constitute basic truths: physical (”This is a cat”), social reality (”I live in Boston”), and nature of the self (”I am a man”). These beliefs are nearly impossible to change.
• Type B - Personal beliefs: These are ego centered and internally formed. Usually self-evaluations (”I’m intelligent”), they can also be phobias or delusions (”I’m fat”).
• Type C - Authority beliefs: These beliefs are formed because of an outside authority, or in opposition to that authority (”I’ll accept that because the president said it” or “I’ll disbelieve that because the president said it”).
• Type D - Beliefs emanating from authority figures: These beliefs are formed indirectly by the actions of authority figures (People’s distrust of Richard Nixon led them to distrust the office of the President and of government and politics in general).

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Deregulation in the utilities industry results in higher costs whenever those costs are not expected to greatly affect consumption (also in the oil industry), contrary to the consequentialist arguments of deregulation proponents. The same thing is happening in the communications sector.

From a BoingBoing comment on a broadband penetration related post. I have no clue if that’s a standard economic opinion.

Last week I attended NTEN’s 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference and sat in on a wonderful session entitled Nonprofit Communications 2.0: Seven Steps to Transform Your Organization. Led by Lauren-Glenn Davitian of the CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, the session provided a strong framework for nonprofits to better communicate in an increasingly networked society.

I am also very lucky to serve with Lauren-Glenn on the editorial board of the Community Media Review.

The video itself is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes long and worth every second, but I included my notes from the session below. …read more