Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

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How Much of Yourself Would You Give To an Avatar?

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

Why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence?

Several recent YouTube videos have shown experiments where a person agrees to work with an A. I. firm to create an avatar to stand in for themselves. The effort involves a little more work than I thought: lots of sampling of one’s voice and body to get enough “data” to create a passable clone. For some reasons this has some appeal, even beyond gaming.

Wikipedia cary grant
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To be sure, many of us are required to put in facetime with groups that can drain our energies. I remember a faculty meeting where we had an extended debate about what kind of pencils to pass out at open houses. It would have been nice to have an avatar sit through that discussion. Similarly, those obligatory photos of faculty found in a hallway just outside of most academic departments can be awkward. I always thought that I might quietly slip in a picture of the classic film star, Cary Grant, above my name. The narcissists passing by would never notice. But others might quickly recognize that Grant’s agreeable likeness is nothing like the prickly guy they know from faculty meetings.

As a rhetorician I am interested in the process,where we pass off someone’s, nay, some electronic device’s efforts to stand in for our personal rhetoric.  Among other things, A.I. is about finding another way to clothe part of ourselves.

But why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence? Think of living life with only a collection of greeting card words to represent our feelings, or depending on the slack descriptive prose of a high school textbook to describe everything else. Most of us would hate these limitations. We’ve worked hard in life to acquire a recognizable and successful identity that reflects our experiences and values.

We all carry unique rhetorical fingerprints.

If I was still in a classroom on a daily basis—and characteristically overestimating my persuasive powers–this would be the point I would want to pass on to my students. They should insist on the perogative to speak in their own authentic voice. No A.I. system is going to get it quite right. How could it? Lived experience is unique to our biological selves, not to silicon-based and generic memories pasted together by an anonymous organization in our name. By early adulthood we have already earned the right to see and describe the world in our terms. Achieving a coherent and specific lexicon is a significant developmental achievement, a kind of rhetorical fingerprint. Ceding control of the ways we leave our mark on the world is fool’s errand. It is one thing to sing another’s song. It is altogether different to allow any other source to speak in our name.

Of course my logic includes the premise that we see our discourse as an extension of our authentic selves. But straight discursive prose tends to be generic: the same kind of language you might find in a Wikipedia article or a textbook. Some students asked to write about what they do not yet fully know may be only too happy to pick up anything already written that they can claim, even though this is plagiarism. In assigned reports and summaries of events, schools encourage student writing that is disassociating and neutral. The defining fingerprints of any author will be concealed. Even so, pure exposition tied to one’s own avatar won’t garner much interest. Who really wants to be a talking encyclopedia? Most of us need to have a unique rhetorical style that is ours alone. This is what it means to earn the honor of authentic authorship.

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How Do We Know What’s Going On?

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

letters in pileNovelists have the advantage of building a story around thoughts not expressed in outward behavior.

A recent novel reviewed in the New York Times portrays a 15-year-old plagued by panic attacks. Micheal Clune has certainly written a timely book. But the review made me wonder if a more direct route to the subject would be a work of non-fiction, building on a growing body of research documenting the strains of growing up in our fractured culture. The thought came up because I find ther subject interesting, even though I’m typically not a reader of fiction. I seem to find enough excitement and mayhem in descriptions of real American life.

But I have changed my mind. On second thought, the novel that I still need to read probably allows better access to the plausible intrapersonal chatter that happens within key figures. A leap into a subject’s interiority is so much easier for a storyteller. Especially in a bright but terrified teen, the clearest lens capturing their world is surely all of those unspoken but felt impressions ehat can be written into a narrative. Novelists devise all kinds of clever ways to let us eavesdrop, either through the words of a narrator, or in first-person thoughts passed only to the reader.

As a parent and a former occupant of a much younger body, it is still easy to remember how opaque we sometimes were to parents and other adults. In adolesence moody silence is almost the norm. At least it was true for my brother and me. I can remember my parents grasping for any information about whether we enjoyed a date or party. There are sometimes exceptions, as seen in Richard Linklater’s fascinating multi-year narrative, Boyhood (2014). But a nearly mute adolescent male is a familiar type.

The Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves has coined the term “male malaise” to describe the challenging odds young men face in realizing the American Dream, with its legacy of earning a spot on the culture’s ladder of success. In addition, boys are encouraged to model heroes shown to act aggressively but explain very little. It fits that classic actors like Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone were known to cut lines from their scripts, flexing all of their muscles except their vocal cords. Likewise, we have never seen a “wordy” John Wayne film. To be sure, these are old examples, but Hollywood has always favored capturing the visual demeanor of characters more than their lines. It follows that the cinematic idea of getting ahead still oversells male machismo and superhuman power.

Novels exploring the psychology of their characters also have the additional advantage of escaping the dilemma of dwelling on less than flattering revelations about an actual person. Autobiographies, for example, are not known for their frank candor. We have narrative characters to fill the gap. What lurks in the darkest corner of a story can be played out without an unwanted trail of thoughts leading back to a person still with us. If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures,” it is because the  tools of narrataion can make what is hidden more transparent. The old saw passed on to new writers to reveal characters through actions rather than description makes sense. But a writer can facilitate a character’s interiority in so many interesting ways. In her book for would-be authors (Bird by Bird, 1995) Anne Lamott notes that “we write to expose the unexposed.”

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words. . .