Best Laid Plans Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns

McDonnell here offers some startling new ways to think about propaganda, specifically about health campaigns. He uses HIV/AIDS media campaigns in Ghana as his case, laying out efforts to control and organize how local communities make sense of the disease. Using media to change people s sexual practices involves evidence-based design, opinion leaders in the design process, and getting all organizations behind a single message. But these campaigns hardly ever work. Why? They are subject to cultural misfires: they are disrupted by misinterpretation and misuse. Enter cultural entropy this concept identifies a process through which intended meanings and uses of propaganda (and other cultural objects) fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. The book shows with exquisite ethnographic details how the AIDS media campaigns succumb to cultural entropy: e.g., how people turn female condoms into bracelets, AIDS posters go missing from public postings and become home decor, and red ribbons fade into pink ribbons under the sun. Cultural entropy is a disruption process that affects things as well as symbols. Cultural entropy offers a new explanation for the failure of AIDS campaigns specifically and modern interventions broadly."