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ISFD N°30 Lengua Y Expresión Escrita IV Prof. Blas Bigatti

Trenti, Andrea

Young adults as a silent target: analysis of communication strategies from the “Plan Nacional de Lectura.”

To inform is to transmit a one-way message. To communicate is to create meaning collectively. Any public campaign can definitely convey pieces of information, but not all of them can achieve real communication. This is, to establish meaningful links with their target audience.

The purpose of this paper is to examine material of the public campaign from the “Plan Nacional de Lectura”1 (Resolution 1044/08), a national plan designed by the Ministry of Education of Argentina whose aim is to promote reading habits among children, teenagers and adults. From all the materials that the campaign includes, this paper will focus on the institutional video of the “Plan Nacional de Lectura” and two representative graphic materials distributed in public places.

State plans, programmes and projects are public policies. These are decisions made by the State as a way of taking position on socially problematized matters (Oszlak 1997). These policies might include a public campaign, which is a group of communication strategies designed to promote changes in people´s attitudes and behaviours, or to encourage the adoption of certain habits. In the 1970s, Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman introduced the concept of social marketing, through which they suggest that the same marketing principles used to sell products to consumers can be used to influence social behaviour, not to the benefit of the marketer but to the benefit of the target audience and the society in general (Weinreich 2006). Thus, the main focus here is on the audience, on their needs and perceptions. Claudio Basile (2011) claims that, in order to build and effective message, it is essential to know deeply the target group’s life style, habits, culture, behaviour and needs. The campaign must represent these dimensions in order to talk directly to its audience. This means that the target group must feel identified with the elements presented in the texts that the public campaign combines.

The foundation of the “Plan Nacional de Lectura” establishes that the beneficiaries of the plan include teachers and students from all levels and “modalidades” (oriented cycles) of the 1

National Reading Plan.

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ISFD N°30 Lengua Y Expresión Escrita IV Prof. Blas Bigatti Trenti, Andrea Educational System. In addition, one of the objectives of the plan is to “promote the pleasure for reading from an early age, in children, teenagers and young adults, fostering it as a permanent practice (…).”2 Here, the distinction between children and young adults is not just a matter of age.

Considering adolescents as a specific group of readers requires recognizing particular interests and needs that differentiate them either from child or adult readers.This paper argues that despite the fact that adolescents are included among the beneficiaries of this plan, the public campaign that it comprises does not build young adults as the target audience.

To begin with, the institutional video of the plan does not represent the voice of young adults. This short film introduces the objectives of the plan and describes its implementation through a series of images and narratives that illustrate the kind of actions this plan encourages.

Young adults appear occasionally at the background of the video and their voices are never heard.

Gail De Vos (2003) suggests that adolescents go through special needs, such as the need for entertainment and information, the need to belong, the need to learn in a social context, the need to establish a self-concept and the need to communicate with adults interested in them. However, none of these needs are represented in the video. Moreover, young adults’ needs and perception as regards the practice of reading are also completely omitted. The first image of the video is a little boy who is reading aloud. An adult narrator in off tells what the plan is about and enumerates its lines of actions. Meanwhile, there is a sequence of images that show different agents taking part in different activities proposed by the plan. “I like the tales that you tell to go to bed. I like those ones”3, a little child explains. In addition, other voices make up this video: a teacher who shares the experience of receiving a writer at her school; a storyteller telling a story to children, and some specialists who state the benefits of the practice of reading. Nevertheless, young adults are simply shown in three short scenes as listeners of some other social actors. This failed strategy uncovers the lack of representation of adolescents’ perceptions, thoughts and practices in the institutional video of the plan. Young adults cannot hear their own voices in this text.

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“Promover el gusto por la lectura desde edades tempranas, en los niños, adolescentes y jóvenes, propiciándola como práctica permanente (…).”

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“Me gustan los cuentos que contás y son para dormirse. Me gustan esos”.

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ISFD N°30 Lengua Y Expresión Escrita IV Prof. Blas Bigatti Trenti, Andrea Similarly, the graphic material that the campaign involves presents elements with which young adults cannot identify. According to De Vos, one of the challenges of adolescence is the development of a sense of personal identity. This is a period of search and rebuilding of the self.

Therefore, identification with the characters in texts or with the situations portrayed in them becomes essential. However, the famous personalities and the messages that appear in representative graphic materials of the campaign are far from connecting young adults with themselves. One of these graphic materials is clearly aimed at parents. It shows the image of Patricia Sosa, a singer that is not an adolescent and is not associated to any cultural product intended to young adults. Therefore, the message that this material conveys is not designed for adolescents: “Reading is good. Reading with your children is much better”4. Below, a message in inverted commas and signed by the singer invites the audience to reflect on narration. “The voice of the narrator will stay forever in the heart of the listener”5, she claims. Since this material talks to parents and promotes the habit of reading to their children, adolescents are not expected to identify themselves with this text.

The other graphic material selected here presents the image of María Eugenia Lozano, a TV and radio presenter that is not an adolescent and does not belong to the world of young adults.

In this case, the message is introduced as direct speech with quotation marks: “When you read you imagine your own film. Your mind widens and nice things happen.”6 Young adults might not identify either with the famous person that the material shows or with the message it conveys.

They cannot find their own reality expressed in this material. It does not talk from the perspective of adolescents, from their needs, from their perceptions or from their interests. This material does not build a situation that can connect adolescents with themselves.

A policy that aims to promote habits and behaviours in society needs to establish strong links with people’s feelings and thoughts. Public campaigns are a valuable resource for creating dialogues between those who send a message and those who become potential readers or listeners. The communication strategies that the “Plan Nacional de Lectura” develops do not propose a shared ground with all the beneficiaries of the plan, which involve children, adolescents 4

“Leer es bueno. Leer con tus hijos es mucho mejor”.

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“La voz del que narra quedará para siempre en el corazón del que escucha”.

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“Cuando leés te imaginás tu propia película. Tu mente se amplía y suceden cosas bonitas”.

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ISFD N掳30 Lengua Y Expresi贸n Escrita IV Prof. Blas Bigatti Trenti, Andrea and adults. The materials that these strategies include do not talk to young adults. The institutional video of the plan expresses a clear imbalance in the representation of social actors: while children are the protagonists in many scenes, adolescents are only shown in a few images and they are never given the voice. Besides, the graphic material the public campaign includes does not link young adults with their own experiences. These communication strategies uncover a deep contradiction. Although young adults are specified among the beneficiaries of the plan, they are not built as the target audience in its public campaign. Therefore, this campaign can simply inform adolescents, but it cannot establish real communication. This is, it does not invite young adults to create meaning collectively.

REFERENCES

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Oszlak, Oscar (1997) La formaci贸n del estado argentino; Editorial Planeta; Buenos Aires; p36.

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Basile, Claudio (2011) La Estrategia Creativa http://claudiobasile.files.wordpress.com/.../la-estrategia-creativa.pdf (Accessed 24/10/14).

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Weinreich, Nedra Kline (2006) What is Social Marketing? http://www.social-marketing.com/Whatis.html (Accessed 25/10/14)

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ISFD N°30 Lengua Y Expresión Escrita IV Prof. Blas Bigatti Trenti, Andrea - De Vos, Gail (2003) “Storytelling and the Young Adult” in Storytelling for Young Adults: A guide to tales for Teens.

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Fundamentación “Plan Nacional de Lectura” http://-planlectura.educ.ar/pdf/lineamientos_plan.pdf (Accessed 16/10/14)

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