Problem Practices | The Perfect Response

To the digital native, being truly alone without some sort of external distraction is—irony of ironies—”unnatural,” almost as if the chatter from our own mind is the rhetoric of a stranger.

We can easily feel the burdens of having more knowledge than we can handle. Searching online is like trying to drink from a fire hose. We should have known it would happen when “Google” became a verb in addition to a noun. Type in something as straightforward as “Green Mountains of Vermont,” and you’ll get about 3.3 million hits. Similarly, catch a few minutes of CNN in an airport and perhaps you get the deaths of children in a bombed Gaza hospital, news of a missing airliner, killer tornadoes in the Midwest.

The hose analogy is suggestive, but the proportions are probably wrong. Our pervasive media use is more like trying to snag a cup of water from one of the massive outflow tunnels exiting the bottom of Hoover Dam. The point is the same: the flood of information coming at us from digital sources is simply overwhelming, giving rise to another common water-based cliche: How do we “tame the information tide?”

We all know the sources that push us away from ourselves. In addition to online searches there are mobile phones, phone apps, tweets and texts, e-mail, cable and broadcast programming, news alerts, RSS feeds, Facebook “notifications,” not to mention blogs like this one. In addition, many of us are still deeply dependent on newspapers, magazines, movies, product catalogs, Pandora, MP3s, radio and podcasts. Every waking minute of every day offers some distraction to drain away our abilities to focus, concentrate and—most ominously—face the unpredictable beast of our own thoughts.

On a commuter train recently it was hard to not hear the increasingly heated cell phone conversation unfolding between a passenger and her mother. It sounded like both sides were picking old wounds that have never quite healed. Charges of emotional neglect and indifference hurled back and forth. The rider’s injunctions were laced with scorn. And she seemed to not notice that others where an involuntary audience to her woes.

One could not help but think: was this really the best moment to have this discussion? Shouldn’t precious and fragile family relations be maintained in a better setting that could increase the chances of a better result? In other words, must we accept the socially awkward terms of usage that new media randomly impose on us? We seem increasingly unable to manage our informational world.

To say we pay a price for trying to bear up under media intrusions of our own making is now obvious. For most of us the compulsion to keep checking back on the open channels we have set up is nearly total and time consuming. We choose to keep our digital companions on. We willingly succumb to the “breaking news” story from a cable news outlet, or the random tweets and texts of others. We may even stop a lively conversation to check a minor disputed fact that has just surfaced.

For the privilege of total immersion, we pay the price of slowly alienating ourselves from ourselves. To the digital native, being truly alone without some sort of external distraction is—irony of ironies—unnatural: almost as if the chatter coming from our own mind is the rhetoric of a stranger.

That’s a problem because we probably have some interesting things to hear from our inner selves. A common view is that our intrapersonal chatter is often dysfunctional: full of anxieties, useless fantasies, and other forms of impractical mental skywriting. But all these attributes of consciousness contribute to our self-awareness. They are important. We need time to work this stuff out. They are among the reasons we walk and sleep. Not giving ourselves the time to know what we think sets us up to be aimless and disoriented.

To be sure, if media theory tells us anything, it is that our media-use habits don’t revert. There’s no waiting-for-a-phone-call Meet-Me-in-St.-Louis future for any of us. Media evolve, and we do our best to keep up. We just have to work a little harder to not allow them to squeeze a precious sentience out of our lives.

The next time you are stuck waiting for something to happen, try listening to the productive insights that your brain has on offer. The trick is moving past the momentary boredom of being truly “with” yourself. Soon enough you will discover the neglected personal business that truly matters.

There’s a natural truth to the familiar line, “he was quoted out of context.” It could hardly be otherwise.

When we think of communication we often talk of it as a product. “This is what he said,” or “She was surprisingly angry when she explained the problem.” Thinking this way—that we can freeze moments and observe them—is unavoidable. But embedded in the recreation of our communication is a forgotten problem that frequently gets us into trouble.

We tend to forget that communication is actually a process. It exist as a reaction to a world of influences on a speaker that grow more invisible over time. While the words remain static on the page or in a recorded segment, the forces that shaped the speaker’s views drift toward obscurity. We can be like the Broadway producer that lifts the word “Amazing!” out of reviewer’s comments, neglecting the rest of the writer’s judgment that the director showed an “amazing misuse of a talented cast.”

I was reminded of how original meaning drifts far from what a source intended during a viewing of a BBC retrospective program about Ken Russell, the iconic British producer of a number of memorable films about artists and composers. His subject in one project was the English composer Edward Elgar. Everyone recognizes his Pomp and Circumstance March Number 1, which is both the unofficial British national anthem Land of Hope and Glory, but better known to Americans as the solemn march that frequently accompanies graduation ceremonies. Russell reminds us that the piece became popular during World War I, when it was more or less co-opted as a kind of anthem to British imperialism. But its use as a call to battle against Germany troubled the reclusive Elgar.[i] After all, Germany rather than fickle London was where he first gained a foothold as a recognized composer. He was also appalled to have his music associated with the defeat of so important a patron.

We are all like Elgar. Sometimes the music we have created is not what others hear. It’s a common rhetorical necessity to “correct the record” when someone offers a restatement of our views that shows little awareness of why they were made and the circumstances that produced them. “That’s not exactly what I meant” is the common reply, and a preface to contextualized details we may feel compelled to add.

This may be one reasons that reading legal documents that cite case law and precedents can be so annoying. Legal principles must stand equally for all cases ruled to be of the same type. Context counts less than it should. But broad rules tend to obliterate important exceptions, exemptions, and unique circumstances. For example, a law against loitering can be a bludgeon in the hands insensitive local police. On occasion we all loiter, meaning we linger in a public space, usually for reasons that are perfectly harmless.

There is also the common and often sly strategy to use another’s words for our own communication objectives. We can selectively cite an out-of-context phrase simply because it can better demonize another. The words are used as a marker of difference rather than an accurate rendering of someone’s full view. This can be a tactic of a headline writer who is intent on selling a story by making its subject look like a fool.

So there’s a natural truth about the cliché, “he was quoted out of context.” It could hardly be otherwise. In truth, we can usually do a better job of representing the views of others by calling upon the latent historian in all of us. We often have a natural curiosity for the humanizing backstories of others. Fairness to an absent but quoted person demands at least a thumbnail reconstruction of the known circumstances surrounding their words.

[i] BBC, Ken Russell at the BBC, DVD, 2008.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

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