By Prakash Sharma and Reshma Tonse
For something that weighs barely two percent of the total body weight, our brains disproportionately make up for almost 20 percent of our total energy consumption. After all, apart from managing internal functions, our brains process overwhelming amounts of information every moment, sifting through what’s important, what’s mundane, what’s threatening, what’s exciting and so on.
Buster Bension summarized it as the challenge of too much information without meaning, to be processed with scarce time and insufficient memory. The sifting mechanism? Notice the bizarreness, new information, repetitions and confirmations. Ignore the rest to make meaning that makes sense.
But what to do when there isn’t enough meaning to decode? Simple! Create it. Fill the gaps with information and attitudes you already have in stock. And do it quickly. There isn’t too much spare memory or time to make perfectly thought out decisions.
From the lens of information processing for the brain, Poonam Pandey, a young woman suddenly dying on Instagram, is bizarre. It stood out among the sea of inane information. The cause of the death makes for new information to pay attention to. It is noticeable. It registers.
So far so good.
What does it mean though?
Balbir Pasha ko Aids ho gaya,
Poonam Pandey ko cervical cancer
A path breaking campaign broke in the early 2000s about a fictional character called Balbir Pasha who, India was forced to speculate, would catch AIDS or not. The brilliant awareness programme about condom usage to avoid STDs revolved around peers of the legendary Pasha, whom we never meet, discuss how his best days are behind him if he forgets to use a condom, even once.
The campaign featured sex workers and locker room talk, men at bars discussing Balbir Pasha’s enviable sex life – a playground for naughty jokes and all kinds of sexual innuendo. But because that was not the job of communication, the campaign was not designed to trigger humour. It triggered fear. While the creative dropped a mass question in the minds of its audience – “Balbir Pasha ko AIDS hoga kya?” , the meaning it designed for them was the up close and violent anxiety around the stigma of AIDS.
Two decades later, with drastically new media but the same old world values, we look for the meaning behind Poonam Pandey’s death. To make sense of it all, the mind sifts through existing knowledge of Poonam Pandey as a pop culture phenomenon. An untimely demise and memories of a young life lived ripe with sensationalist tendencies. Add to that, new information. Cervical cancer. “Some woman related unfortunate disease.” sums most of the public’s understanding of it. A cursory glance of her death-post informs of all the different ways netizens were processing all the little bits of information together. Whether or not connections were made to make ‘meaning’, before it got better, it only got worse.
Pandey arises the next day, undead. Another bizarreness. The news stands out and is noticed, again. And again, new meanings are derived.
A ‘stunt’
We use the term ‘stunt’, because this is the one of the first words that were used to process the grand revelation of the awareness campaign. As the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman says, “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution”. The question of “Why did Poonam Pandey do this?” is easily substituted with “What else can you expect from Poonam Pandey?”
It’s just the way the brain works, always in a hurry to attach meaning to new information. It’s great at answering questions. It doesn’t care about the answers being right, though. This is true of the way we processed Poonam Pandey’s death due to cervical cancer. This is true of the way we processed news that she didn’t die due to cervical cancer, too. Suddenly, all of it is a stunt.
One woman dies of cervical cancer in India every eight minutes. Almost 95 percent of these cases are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), a common sexually and also less commonly, but completely plausibly, a non sexually transmitted infection. The good news is that there’s vaccination available. One of the challenges though is the difficulty of having open conversations about sex in our society. Especially for women.
Many women worry about medical professionals inquiring about one’s sexual activity when they seek HPV vaccination. An authority figure’s focus on their personal choices is an uncomfortable experience. When it comes to younger girl children, convincing parents to have a discussion on vaccination is already ripe with challenges. There are two to begin with. First, vaccination is associated with early childhood. A teenager needing vaccination is bound to bring resistance, especially when it is spoken about with undue focus on girls. (Boys too can take the vaccine). Secondly, as a parent, you can imagine how hard it must be to bring the concepts of “STD” and “my own child” to sit in the same sentence, next to each other.
Precisely why the vaccine was disconnected “in meaning” from HPV, a common disease that can be transmitted sexually. It was connected instead to an effect of HPV, which is Cervical Cancer. It is an elegant solution to a cultural problem. Remove the morality and Indian gender value system barriers to HPV vaccine. Severe the connection between the two. Make it about cervical cancer prevention.
There is a lot of conversation around if the campaign was good, bad, took it too far, thought out or not, etc. This is yet another. Yet the fundamental question remains. What was the job of communication? Awareness is not equal to noise. Awareness is equal to attitude shift.
If the job of communication was to help parents of young children and young women trust the new vaccine, keeping in mind that women’s sexual reproductive health is not as positively received in this country as it should be, how does the big idea of – known sensationalist pretending to be dead for a day – fare?
Prakash Sharma and Reshma Tonse are the co-founders of 1001 Stories, a user-consumer research and solutions consultancy which uses Behavioural Science and Context Architecture to analyse, understand and influence human behaviour.