an inconvenient truth. a documentary about global warming. a lot of people believe that the use of the frog and ice cream was necessary to break "the seriousness of the movie, not the issue". they said it was necessary so that people would not be overloaded with too much factual information and statistical details, and that it helps to bring home the message of the fil.
the point of such a documentary i believe, is to show that all the people of the earth are ultimately responsible for global warming, simply by because they exist. some, of course, are more responsible than others, while it is also true, that some times, you cant pinpoint and say who's to blame. but that requires a whole seperate debate altogther.
the focus of the debate should have been more on why and how people contribute to global warming, and the possible remedies to tackle it. the very fact that the debate focused more on how effective the frog and ice cream were as a medium of communication shows how we missed the point. of course, the effectiveness of the presentation of the content is relevant, but one needs to decide which of the two is more important: the form or the content.
however important any debate on form vs content might be as students of environment and development communication, as human beings who inhabit planet earth, what we do with the experience of watching the documentary should bother us at least a little bit. at least more than frogs and ice creams.
if the frog and the ice cream is all we can debate about in spite of all the arguments, statistics, details, facts, presented in the documentary, then i believe that our extinction willl be just sooner rather than later.
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