Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Friday 8 October 2010

Raising Awareness

I want to ride a tricycle from Vladivostok to Glasgow to raise awareness of the critical shortage of human attention.

Seriously, "raising awareness" campaigns make no sense to me in a world awash with campaigns on all sorts of issues. Instead of spending money on these global jaunts, let's spend it on actually trying to fix problems.

Comments

d
Thank you for raising awareness of this problem.
Ted Mielczarek
Seriously. I see people posting things online to "raise awareness of breast cancer." Are there really people that are unaware that breast cancer exists?
anon
You could do this during The Onion's National Awareness Month.
voracity
@Ted: No, but there *are* people that are unaware that their latest yearly donation to breast cancer research doesn't exist.
Dustin J. Mitchell
voracity's got it: "raise awareness" is either a shorthand for, or a step on the way to, "raise funds".
It's definitely gotten out of hand with breast cancer, but there are other diseases, disorders, problems, etc. that are in need of better research funding (especially in the US, where some kinds of research are heavily disfavored by conservatives).
You're right about the shortage of human attention: people can only be aware of a limited number of things, so there's competition over which things those are. For example, I'm sure a lot more people (in the US at least) know it's breast cancer awareness month than know about the flooding in Hungary.