Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Tuning Out of Public Spaces

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Positive situational awareness means someone knows what is going on around them.

There is a walker in front of my house that I see almost  every day. He is clearly diligent in getting some exercise. But here’s the thing: he walks, head down, staring at his right hand. Though he passes others in neighboring yards and on the narrow sidewalk, he seems mesmerized by the screen he is holding. I expect that eventually he will fly off the edge of the curb one day when gravity reminds him that multitasking can be dangerous.  Walking and reading at the same time are not really companionable activities. This pattern repeated on most pedestrian routes everywhere is a reminder of a minor violation of the social contract. Simply put, we should first notice others and acknowledge them: not every time and not all the time, but sometimes. The norm might be a verbal greeting, or at least a friendly glance.

What have we lost when it is no longer routine to affirm someone in their presence?  It’s a signal of something bigger that has been building for several decades.

This awareness of people passing within our personal space ties into the useful idea of “situational awareness,” which applies to everyone from airline pilots to close encounters on a sidewalk. Positive situational awareness requires that a person notice what is going on in the real world around them: perhaps noticing a pedestrian about to step in front of an oncoming car, a baby verging near the edge of a swimming pool,  or even a large boat about to crash into a quay.

We were not made to be mentally immobilized by our portable devices. Such is our fractured attention that we miss experiences where we might engage. I’ve told this story before: a trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon through brush-covered flat prairie, suddenly coming upon the breathtaking gorges extending to valley floors too deep to see. This miraculous break in the landscape of the high desert can leave one speechless. I’ve seen first-time viewers break into tears at the awesome sight. Within a few feet of the sheer rim we noticed a family pulled over in their car.  They have apparently just arrived. The parents walk to a nearby precipice to take in the wonder of it all, but their children are still in the car watching a video.

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The relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters.

There is a bigger point here. We are still in the first generations of a tectonic shift in how humans interact. Roughly speaking, for thousands of years communication with others in our species was direct and unmediated. Human groups lived together and constructed social selves from daily experience. But especially after the birth of commercial radio in 1920, our relationships with each other began to rapidly change.

I’ve probably buried the lede here. But in the history of the species, the advent of radio is a key thershold that has helped initiate us into what is now the norm of trucated communication. For better or worse, it put listeners on just the receiving end of mediated messages. No need to react, respond, or acknowledge. A mediated message is filtered through some mechanical-electrical tool and often stripped of the nuances of face-to-face communication. True, books, letters and newspapers existed decades earlier. But in the west radio was more revolutionary than evolutionary. It was  the first widespread medium where a family could be in the same room, but left to the stimuli of an external source that isolates the consciousness. This relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters. In media analyst Sherry Turkle’s words, “we expect more from technology and less from each other.” And so we have a acquired a fairly recent incapacity. Media and even portable phones have retrained us to be more comfortable in our own heads. Like that walker I first mentioned, many of us seem to be more solitary souls, saving full and rich interaction only when it is necessary.

 

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Where Is The Substantive Discussion?

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Our political discourse is not only more coarse than in the recent past, it also suffers from people disinclined to explain the logic of their positions. 

These days an American needs to look hard to find substantive discussions of proposed federal actions that will have significant effects. Asserting a position is one thing. Supporting the assertion with genuine good reasons is another. Federal downsizing, budget levels, infrastructure expenditures, and grants for programs ranging from health care to the arts would benefit from some deep dives into the specifics of what a  federal response should be. But with the exception of some third-party experts, or back-bencher members of Congress, or some long-form  news stories, we get sound bites rather than details.  Our President can get about half way to one generic reason, but not the solid reasoning for a particular decision. Too often the default is the conversion of a substantive issue into an inconsequential battle of political personalities. The scattered debate about bombing Iraq was a rare and only partial exception. Of course, if a leader’s only reasons for a change in policy are spite or retribution, we are probably not going to hear it.

A necessary distinction for understanding political rhetoric is between instrumental talk and expressive talk. As this broad difference suggests, instrumental discussion is focused on the merits of arguments or routes to a compromise for a given proposal. Instrumental talk is not about people or personalities, but about their ideas, values, goals, and whether evidence exists for their claims. Even as it becomes distressingly rare, It is the more substantial rhetorical form that is basic to decision-making in an open society. By contrast, expressive talk is about the theater of policy and its players. For example, do we really have not heard compelling reasons for why funding for the Voice of America was cut, or why NOAA kneecapped, in spite of evidence that it provides essential environmental data to corporations and citizens,  And Do we have an administration position on the total closure of USAID?  Or must we accept Elon Musk’s arrogant conclusion based on no evidence that USAID was “a criminal organization?”  Even with its life-saving work especially for children, he simply asserted  that it was “time for it to die,” and enjoying “the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” I have not seen other administration arguments for the cuts to these and many other programs. And has any American heard a sustained and compelling explanation for the high tariffs put on our northern neighbor and former ally?  It has been a long summer season of drama, but little public discussion.

National Politics is Personalized 

Expressive communication is centered on the personal characteristics of the people with a stake in a given outcome. In its most common forms it involves name-calling, the questioning of another side’s motives, and dismissive and self-serving summations of what others are trying to achieve with a given legislative act. One of Donald Trump’s recent claims for why Elon Musk abandoned his earlier advisory role is mostly attributed to Musk’s unhappiness with the President’s policy of not allowing tax credits for the purchase of electric automobiles. Musk called the portion of the proposed fax bill with this provision a “disgusting abomination.”  Trump, in turn, noted that Musk “went crazy” over the bill. Both are headline-grabbing expressive responses: noticeably devoid of any substantive discussion of the reasons for providing financial incentives for purchasing electric cars.

In our national politics expressive language is rhetorical candy: gratifying for its obvious effects, but having little value in shedding light on the substantive reasons for an action. “Dogs,” “losers,” and “enemies of the people”–all Trumpisms–don’t cut it as terms of substantive discourse. The problem is made worse by the obvious news value of including a sound bite of a politician in full flight, guns of indignation blasting.

Try using these distinctions in your own assessments of another’s political discussion. Do the parties have real reasons that are given? Can they outline what is at stake? Or are we just getting a recital of attitudes that, in the end, amount to little more than pseudo-responses? At the next town meeting with a federal or local official a good question is to inquire about why the politician will support or vote against a pending piece of legislation. Political “showhorses” will typically seek a way to attack a group or person. A “workhorse” will explain what he or she thinks are the merits of the pending legislation.