Persuasive communication in vocational development.

Last week I worked at an exhibition called Skills Masters. During three days students compete to become the best cook, electrician, mechanic etc. Each stand represent a trade or business and so I had to work on the OBIT stand, what represent the installation trade. Several MBO and VMBO students fight to be the best heating installer, roof builder, bathroom installer etc of the Netherlands. During this competition the exhibition is visited by schools and their students. These students are between 12 and 15 years old and have to choose their study direction. The Skills Masters exhibition shows all possible studies and every exhibitor tries to inform and persuade the students to choose the presented studies.
Students visit the exhibition with their school and will separated in groups of 10 persons. Every group get a ‘tour guide’ and these guides ensure that the students will visit all stands. At each stand there are employees who will guide the students through the stand and tell them about the studies represented.  It sounds like a very good an useful method to inform the students about the study opportunities they have, but there seems to be a contradiction between reality and theory.

However, to communicate you need a sender and a receiver. Walking on the exhibition you can see that all senders did their work very well, but their success depends on the interaction between sender and receiver, so the receiver is really important to succeed. During my work on the exhibition it was clear to me that most of the receivers are not interested in the information and are not listening to the tour guides. A small amount of information the exhibitor want to communicate to the students will be received and so all the effort has less success.  All these companies and trade representatives tries to inform and persuade the children, they put a lot of effort in the exhibition but what will be the outcome of all this? In my opinion the outcome of the exhibition is minimal, simply because it seems the receiver is not interested in the information.

Propaganda: A part of history?

While reading documents of the Second World War during the History lessons you could see the power of communication. Nowadays we know the stories from all the possible angles but back in that days the people knew just a small part of the story. And this small part was mostly based on propaganda. The Nazi’s even had a minister of Propaganda to  communicate successful stories to the German population but also to communicate to other nations. In these days Propaganda was a very important and useful tool to get the crowd shared behind you, because there was less communication and so nobody could control the facts and the stories you told them.

However, there had been some developments what makes Propaganda a less easy tool to use. All over the world are journalists, they film everything and the same day this information can be broadcasted on the other end of the world. Nowadays a lot of people are using social network sites, everybody has an camera on his phone so all information can be send throughout the world in just a few minutes. However not everybody seems to understand the difficulty of Propaganda.

A very well-known example of failed Propaganda was a minister of information in Iraq. I think most of the people remember Al Sahaf the minister of Information of Iraq. He was the man who told the whole world that no American has crossed the border yet, there weren’t any Americans in their country and at that moment you could hear bombs falling in the background.

Last week an example of bad propaganda was seen in North-Africa. Khadafy’s television station broadcasted some peaceful pictures while the BBC broadcasted the picture  of thousands people shouting against the regime, cars were on fire, and you saw the army firing on their own population.

Due to the technical developments what means that information can be send into the world by everybody and can be received by everybody means that Propaganda is a part of history?