more than 20 years’ experience in international humanitarian affairs, environmental policy, and public health. Ennis is a distinguished alumnus of both the University of the Pacific and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment is a matrix entitled “The Information Environment ≠ The Material Environment.” The matrix [below left, click to enlarge] explains that while changing the information doesn't change behavior, changing the tangible material environment does. The matrixLearn more about Dark PR at the publisher's website.breaks down the factors that shape the material environment into three categories: Price, Distance, and Time. For instance, to improve our food environment we can organize and call for political action to end subsidies for, or tax unhealthy foods -- increasing their price.
Browsers opening page 99 would get a great idea of Dark PR. Page 99 is the source code of the entire book. The idea that the “information environment” is not the same as the “material environment” was the underlying inspiration for writing Dark PR. Large corporations undertake enormous effort to distract citizen movements from policies that impact the “material environment” such as soda taxes (price), junk food bans at schools (distance), and bans on the sale of harmful products like cigarettes or junk food to kids (time/age), as I mention on page 99, in favor of “information environment” policies such as nutrition education, warning labels, or “don’t eat junk food” media campaigns. We know, and as I document in Dark PR, that these informationist approaches don’t work, and that even exposure to messaging about these kinds of interventions actually decreases overall political will for materialist policy action. Page 99 is a straightforward diagram that delivers the core message.
I kept theoretical jargon to a minimum in Dark PR in order to avoid “Double Mumbo Jumbo,” -- having too many big ideas confusing my key message. Page 99 was me softly breaking that rule. Since it's a diagram, I said to myself, “people interested will like it, and those not interested will just read on.”
Page 99 touches on the famous sociological debate between Weber’s idealism (i.e. the information environment) and Marx’s materialism (i.e. the material environment). The underlying logic behind information environment efforts stems from the ideas of Weber, and yet, unlike a century ago, we now have clear evidence that interventions based on idealism (i.e. labels, education, mass communication, etc) simply don’t change behavior. We also have very clear evidence that materialist interventions (taxes, location-based bans, age restrictions, etc) are hugely effective. I take pride in this page, as my materialist theoretical framework of Price, Distance, and Time (or Price, Proximity, and Temporality as I more often call it now), being core to the solution I propose in the book, is clearly laid out in a way I didn’t have the opportunity to do elsewhere in the manuscript.
I was recently in conversation with Dr. Norah Campbell from Trinity College Dublin who mentioned that she felt that the most important of the three (i.e. Price, Distance, & Time) was time, as, if the bar is closed - no one can drink. She noted that “the alcohol lobby is far more intent in extending the opening hours of licensed premises” than they care about the other factors. That definitely sounds reasonable. I think that each of the three has a weighting that can be expressed algebraically. I imagine this similarly to how loss aversion research shows that a loss is weighted twice the value of a gain. However, I’ve yet to come to a final conclusion as to the weighting. My hunch is that price (E) might be equal to distance (M) multiplied by time (C) squared, but that’s mostly because I like the parallel with E=mc2.
--Marshal Zeringue
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