Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Social Media Just Aren’t That Interesting

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , ,

Powerful?  Undoubtedly. Fascinating to study? Not so much.

Social Media. I teach and write about their uses and commercial functions.  But when push comes to shove (and there is a lot of intellectual shoving here), they just aren’t that interesting.  They are often the routes by which Americans now “connect” with each other. “Communicate” would be an overstatement. Are social media powerful?  Undoubtedly.  An interesting communication form to study?  Not so much.

Texting and posting via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and many other digital forms of Post-it notes usually offer us what is too often the equivalent of the stuff left over in the back desk drawer of the mind: discarded fragments of what still remains to be worked out, or judgments of others that are no credit to one’s own character. It can be a dispiriting thing to stroll through a university library full of tomes of worked out narratives and carefully curated insights into the human condition.  But if one looks at nearby tables, it seems that too many people seated in front of their laptops are doing little more than exchanging thought-fragments that now pass for flashes of judgment.  On the shelves the serious work of linear thinkers mostly remain untouched, while library patrons seem to be surfing through throwaway messages mostly because they can.  And their pictures can be just as problematic, suggesting levels of crippling self-involvement that leave little time or room for others.

My complaint is a professional one. My field used to have a sweeping focus on message analysis, examining those in public life who had interesting, frightening or far-reaching things to say.  But now, it seems, we have returned to the kinds of preoccupations that then defined our still-immature field in the 1960’s: when television was the newest medium and we studied its disposable content with an intensity it rarely deserved. And so here we are again 60 years later, looking at “emergent media” and marveling at .  .  . what exactly? The President’s awful bullying and bluster?  Celebrity comments that “go viral?,” corporations that have mastered micro-targeting because of the trail of digital bread crumbs the rest of us leave?  In terms of the quality and thoughtfulness of the messaging, it’s all pretty tepid stuff.  Perhaps television’s Ellen DeGeneres has it right.  She looks at texting as a source of humor: worth a laugh, but not much more. To be sure, the first wave of media theory with McLuhan and others was exciting.  More recent efforts seem less compelling.

The seemingly durable canons of the field used to include entire philosophies of communication thought out in exquisite detail by thinkers like Kenneth Burke, Susanne Langer, Neil Postman, Hugh Duncan, Wayne Booth, Jane Blankenship, Richard Weaver and many others.  Their names may not be familiar, but their work propelled generations of scholars to take the work of message-analysis seriously.  Burke in particular offered a complete and evocative world view of communication that many of his acolytes adopted and still teach (in my case: to perhaps 6000 students so far).

Remember the famous line in Sunset Boulevard (1950), when the fading Norma Desmond is reminded that she “used to be big”?  Her response seems fitting to for a field that seems lost in the tall grass of pixels and platforms rather than a higher terrain beyond.  “I am big,” she responded. “It’s the pictures that got small.”

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“Brain” or “Mind?”

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , ,
                        Times Higher Education

Sometimes neuro-science needs to give way to more useful explorations of an individual that can be derived phenomenologically.

The study of human communication always calls into question the kind of language that will be used to describe a specific person or message.  This discipline has a long tradition of describing someone’s expressed intentions, verbal habits, and preferred appeals in their own words. And the language is description is usually pretty close to the ground, as when a scholar in political communication characterizes Barack Obama’s rhetoric as “cautious,” “detail oriented,” and prone to strings of qualifiers.  Of course we would need to know more.  But its clear that verbal demeanor obviously has something to do with the personality and character of the whole person: what is going on in their mind.

Over time, all of us gain insights into how others think and what they say by noticing the forces that have pressed in on their lives. This is a basic life skill.  When we say we ‘think we know another’s mind, we are expressing confidence that their particular history and life circumstances have made them at least somewhat transparent. We use this process to gain a sense of who another person “is,” and to make predictions about how they might react to events yet to unfold.

These core starting points are now more frequently being challenged by another class of analysts aspiring to be students of human behavior. More cognitive neuroscientists believe the keys to human conduct lie in mapping the organ of the brain; that human behavior can be understood in the aggregate rather than through the signature style of the individual.

 

Interest in the human brain risks outpacing what should be the continual human project of understanding the person as the possessor of a mind.

 

To be sure, the organ itself is awesome: composed of some 100 billion neurons (!) and incalculable numbers of potential neural pathways that can form consciousness and thought.  Thought itself is an astonishing process that allows nearly infinite sets of unique “circuits” and combinations. And, without doubt, we need neuroscience to learn how various centers function, and how the brain learns, ages, or is altered by biological or foreign agents.

But to study a brain is not the same as learning the features of someone’s mind. The sciences naturally aggregate data, looking for valid universal causes and applications.  And there’s the rub.  Interest in the organ risks outpacing what should be the continual human project of understanding the person as the owner of a unique consciousness. To my thinking, it is useful to know that the ear captures and sends impulses to the auditory cortex.  But my interest begins to flag if someone wants to track how the reception of, say, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony spreads to other neural ‘circuits.’  It would be foolish to claim that nothing of interest could be learned.  But it still strikes me as the equivalent of trying to enter a door through the cat door. It would be more useful want to know a person’s reactions, their feelings and images the music evokes in them.  I short, I’d be interested in what they have to say about the experience.  Those insights would come mostly from queries about their prior experiences, making studies like MRI brain scans of people listening to music seem hopelessly reductionist. At some points, the sciences based on biological observation need to yield what can be learned from phenomenology of human experience.  The scientific method tilts toward not noticing individual uniqueness. And yet it’s our individual attitudes and dispositions that best explain why they behave as they do.