Reviews | The Perfect Response

Good studies of human communication force us to rethink assumptions that are sometimes more comfortable than accurate. They give new life to the familiar and routine.

This very selective sample of books about communication is wide-ranging, mixing history and media theory with some far-ranging discussions of what is possible in human communication. Some of these studies are recent and helpful in understanding how digital media have altered social relationships. Others were published years ago, but will be thought-provoking for anyone interested in exposing the inner layers of communication. They are listed in approximate order of their accessibility to a general reader.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (William Morrow, 1974). This multi-million-seller which recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary is many things: a narrative of a troubled life, a road-trip saga, an account of different modes of thinking, and an evocative introduction to Plato’s concerns about the corruptions of communication. Pirsig weaves all of these threads into a coherent personal narrative focused on his friends and his son. He’s especially intrigued that his chosen field of study, rhetoric, was borne under the dark cloud of intellectual illegitimacy. Plato argued this negative theme in various ways over the course of his life. It’s a claim that Pirsig wants to explore, sometimes while sitting on the saddle of an aging Henderson as he travels through America’s northern plains. Along the way the main event of the narrative is his active mind, considering everything from intellectual black holes to the nature of insanity.

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Anchor Books, 1959). Goffman was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducting
^{Erving Goffman}

research that had a global reach. His methodology of deep observation of everyday events provides all kinds of insights about the intricacies of even simple interactions. The book remains a stalwart for anyone interested in the sociology and communication, and for good reason. His observations of everyday settings–restaurants especially fascinated him–is the perfect antidote to the bland survey research that now dominates so much of the social sciences. And because he helps us see the familiar in new ways, he’s fun to read.

Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Anchor, 1998). Gabler’s study of the first film entrepreneurs is a wonderful piece of social history that is especially timely in the current climate of narrow nativist sentiment. Gabler documents our debt to a select group of Eastern European Jews who gave us the Hollywood film factories. These men were driven to turn out reliable middle-class visions of the American dream, even though they were the victims of virulent anti-Semitism. The ironic result is that they were sometimes kept out of key institutions in the very town they created. The book also confirms how vital film and its modern forms remain to understanding the American experience.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2011). Carr’s popular book makes the case that the pacing and fragmentation of internet content is undermining our abilities to be critical thinkers. Though this study has produced a number of doubters, he is mostly convincing in describing how heavy doses of screen time have altered our abilities to concentrate and focus. We may be schooling ourselves out of the kind of rigorous concentration that has contributed mightily to human progress. His observations raise questions that everyone who is part of the wired planet should consider.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin, 2015). In this useful and eminently readable study, the M.I.T. researcher explains why conversation as the default model for communication is threatened. Using this benchmark, she offers extensive interviews with children and young adults that suggest a drift toward preferences for connecting that weaken links to full and vital face to face exchanges. Her concern is how to maintain the natural social natures of our children, who now fear the unpredictability of direct contact with others. As she notes in her conclusion, “We want more from technology and less from each other. What once would have seemed like ‘friendly service’” from a sales clerk has “now become an inconvenience that keeps us from our phones.”

Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (Oxford, 1986). Although written a number of years ago and in advance of widespread use of the internet, Meyrowitz still makes what I believe is the single best case that newer forms of human communication have undermined the psychological security that came with living only in real space and time. The book is revelatory in its assessment of how visual media work as irresistible magnets for our attention, and how visual media often weaken connections that truly matter. Given his use of seminal thinkers like Goffman and Susanne Langer, Meyrowitz’s framework for assessing communication processes is unsurpassed. By the end of the book he’s offered a haunting intellectual case for how electronic media have undermined the sources of personal identity.

John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air (University of Chicago, 1999). Peters is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa and a frequent critic of the common but mistaken assumptions we have for communication. The Introduction to this book is alone worth a look. It takes apart most of the cherished myths we hold, among them: that communication is the best pathway for settling long-standing differences, and the idea that disagreement is just a matter of misunderstanding. From his very first sentence that “Communication is a registry of modern longings” a reader can sense a study that will offer challenging arguments and interesting insights. The references in the book are sometimes obscure. But every chapter has interesting observations, most of which come by quoting writers and thinkers who were experiencing the powers of telegraphy and the telephone for the first time. Peters also has surprising things to say about communicating with machines, animals and perhaps other sentient beings “out there” in the universe.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

The usual vocabulary of public memorials includes the use height and solidity to reflect rebirth and remembrance. In two of the nation’s most visited monuments that has changed.

**^{One of two 9/11 memorial pools in New York}** **^{commons wikimedia}**

Because they are spatial and visual, public memorials exist as walk-through “texts,” giving form to the nation’s preferred narratives of shared loss or defiant restoration. Or so one would expect with the most visited site in New York, the 9/11 Memorial Park created on the site of the original twin towers.

The park in the dense downtown area covers sixteen acres and consists of rows of Swamp White Oaks bridging two massive black cataracts 30-feet deep. These pools are the exact footprints of the two original towers that used to dominate the lower Manhattan skyline. Each wall in these open depressions is softened by waterfalls that descend in a rush to their sub-grade floors. The water then flows into another square opening at the center, dropping to a deeper level that cannot be seen by a viewer at the edge. The idea of total destruction is thus restated, bringing a visitor back to the awful moments when fire and gravity claimed these spaces.

The pools are framed at the top by waist-high bronze borders naming every victim who died in and around the towers, as well as at the Pentagon and on board the commandeered airliner that crashed in Western Pennsylvania. In all, over 3000 victims and rescuers died on that awful day, paying the price of coordinated attacks of terrorists who had turned four commercial aircraft into weapons.

One_World_Trade_Center_October_2014 — **^{One World Trade Center}**

The park is next to a new glass tower, David Child’s somewhat defensive looking One World Trade Center, rising from a ground-level bunker concealed by glass and topping out at 104 floors. The building is clearly meant to be the national answer to the attacks.

Other structures replacing older offices that were also destroyed will soon complete the rebuilding of the site, which includes an underground 9/11 museum.

For the designers, the key imperative was to visually accommodate a jumble of wounded emotions associated with the violation of our national invincibility, while also building a memorial to the men and women who lost their lives. In addition, there was the competing need of the city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to project themselves as still at the vibrant heart of the nation’s financial center. The assault on the city could not be seen as fatal to its future.

All of these sensitivities are at play in the new World Trade Center. Memories aroused on any visit can give way to a host of feelings: pride in the courage of the rescuers on that day, a renewed sense of horror for the suffering of the victims, ambivalence about the root causes of terrorism targeting Americans, and even recent frustrations over whether the nation has been well served by the banking industries headquartered in the neighborhood.

**^{Indianapolis Civil War Monument Wikipedia.org}**

The usual vocabulary of memorials includes the use of height and visual dominance to represent remembrance and renewal. Look at the war memorials in most town centers and they are often shafts of stone rising from sturdy plinths. References to the fallen are usually inscribed on the shaft. In small towns, every soldier lost to the commemorated war is almost always named.

The pools are thus an anomaly. They are empty dark spaces with water falling to their distant basements. They seem to exist to memorialize and metaphorically recreate the disaster, without an ambitious compensating gesture of rebirth. Perhaps this view underestimates the importance of the new tower and the forest of oaks, which have been given ample ground at the site to grow and expand. All are reminders that “reading” any monument to a national trauma can be tricky.

Vietnam_memorial_dc_c_20031013 — **^{Vietnam Veterans Memorial}**

The black pools of lower Manhattan join the black stone trench of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the western end of the Mall in Washington D. C. It carries the names of over 58,000 soldiers who died in the long war that tore the nation apart in 1968. Maya Lin’s design was initially disparaged as a “gash of shame” because the memorial recedes into the ground rather than rising above it. But even with these initial doubts, the site has become a potent emblem of the sacrifices of that war, with aging vets always around and eager to bear witness to those whose names are etched in the black granite.

A visit to the wall is like a trip to a cemetery. The nearby Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington Monuments are more effusive; it’s easier to glorify a person than a long “quagmire” that turned into a losing cause. The Vietnam memorial can be read as a national acknowledgment of the enormous human costs of a tragic misadventure.

Taken together, it’s easy to see these vital monuments as representations of a more subdued national character. National politicians continue to preach the political equivalents of Old Testament dominance and retribution. Faith in American exceptionalism is still woven into their rhetoric. But these newer monuments tell a very different story.

Comments Woodward@tcnj.edu

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