[edw]

It's like Edward Tufte, Leni Riefenstahl—and, I dunno, Polyphonic Spree?—got together to brainwash you.

I've got to hand it to the video's production company, The Cultivated Word, for creating an triumphantly insipid piece of propaganda. Some advice, though: Try a slightly less obvious, bombastic approach; it might be less clear to your subjects, er audience, what you're trying to do.

The company's motto, from their web site: "We turn passive viewers into engaged audiences." What does that even mean?! Passivity and engagement are fairly orthogonal concepts—and what does "engagement" really mean? And the last time I checked, an audience is made up of viewers.

What they seem to be going for is the cultivation of sentiment based on emotional manipulation, which is nothing new, but I find the way they package it—as part of the solution rather than part of the problem—rather galling.

On another note, it very much reminds me of the end design work done in Waiting for "Superman", which itself made me feel a little like their director thought his audience a group of simpletons in deed of stick figure diagrams explaining the most basic concepts.