Alistair Fairweather: The biggest flaw of many movements for good is they take themselves far too seriously

AW: Sure, Facebook is also about maintaining friendships and organising your social life, but we "do" the site because we find our friends interesting, entertaining, intriguing...sounds like fun doesn't it?
And there's another, deeper aspect to this idea and this campaign. They have made the message infectious - made it into a meme or "mind virus" to borrow Richard Dawkins’ famous neologism.
You "catch" the sense of fun from the videos - you want other people to experience it. How did I get the video? A friend sent it to me, it infected me, and now I am infecting you with it..

SHOOT: Some valid points. However, the idea that you can turn serious business like disease into fun, means you convert it into the same 'use-it-or-lose-it' noise. I get that the wealthy who have the option to be selective in what they ignore will respond to something fun, but in time, our choices to have fun and do what is necessary will become far fewer than they are today. Sorry if that doesn't sound like a fun concept.

clipped from www.news24.com Life is a serious business. Recessions, wars, global warming - we all know these are grave issues that require sober contemplation. But what if we're wrong? Early in October a website launched with a simple mission: to prove that you can get people to do the right thing by making it fun. First they proved that you can get more people (66% more in fact) to take the stairs instead of the escalator, simply by turning the stairs into giant piano keys. Hard to imagine? See it here. But does that necessarily invalidate the message? The biggest flaw of many movements for good is they take themselves far too seriously. Most modern humans, besieged on all sides by heart-rending appeals and dire warnings, eventually become numb to them. In fact fun is the driving force behind some of the biggest sites on the internet. Everything from YouTube to Facebook to Twitter runs on the juice that this intrinsic reward provides.