Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

Did We Miss Something?

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Many online posts appear as snippets of conversations joined somewhere at their midpoint.  They are usually missing crucial ‘set ups.’ 

No one should lose sleep over confusing social media messages. As communication, there are at the bottom of the food chain. Even so, these posts have a puzzling feature that says something interesting about how we now relate to others.

A truism about these digital platforms is that it can be hard to know where an outgoing post is going, and what has come before. The result is an endless stream of message fragments. My experience is mostly limited to seeing Facebook posts intended for a few thousand living in the same area. Many posts go to what Facebook terms the “unconnected:” people that algorithms peg as ‘might be interested.’  That’s a slippery audience, which is a given in this medium. In additon, odds favor bumping into partial “conversations” that walk all over a basic rule for structuring a narrative: know exactly who will receive it and what they may not know.

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Looking at screens has made us lazy in sorting all of this out.  Many folks who have a comment, announcement or observation will make it without including an informal preamble of defining particulars.

We know we must bring a friend up to speed if we have news beyond what they already know. In actual discourse we are good at seeing the puzzlement of another that indicates that they need more information. When this feedback is missing in the unilateral world of social media, we often omit what could be called essential ‘scene setting.’ What conversation analysts call “backgrounding” often gets ignored, as when a post is offered to explain that Maggie has been given some new meds that might help her failing kidneys. I read something like this recently, with a good deal of additional medical information included as well. But only near the end of the post was there a big mid-course correction when the writer noted that “a vet“ gave her only a 50-50 chance. Up to that point the unsolicited health report seemed to be guiding us to a story about a hapless woman in town. To be sure, no one wants to hear about any creature’s health struggles. But the incidental mention of a veternarian obviously changed the character of the message.

Ditto for offers of a professional service with no mention of where the person is located and how they can be contacted, or restaurants that reference their name but not their location, or landlords with property of an unspecified size for rent in an unspecified location. Even messages to those  more closely “connected” to the sender often omit details that are more assumed than known. If Charley has a new job, remind us again of what the old one was. If a sister is moving to Iceland, give us some sense of the reason for the big change. Many posts appear as snippets of a conversations joined somewhere at their midpoint.

If it helps, think of the five story parts taught to journalists and story tellers. Leave out any of these elements and messages begins to falter.

My best guess about why essential details are omitted is that some of us have lost the critical “awareness of the other” that lies at the base of most social relations. Compared to previous generations, we now think of communication less in terms of dyads exchanging views than single sources launching their thoughts into the ether.

A second cause may be even more fundamental.  Humans connecting with others have absorbed incidental and formal information through the durable structure of story-telling, which is actually the template for most human thought. Even if we can’t name it, we know this template and its requirement to establish a degree of scene setting. As noted above, there is a sequence to these things.  As others await the retelling of an event, the imperative to get the set-up right can even produce a note of anxiousness. This sequencing is clear to most persons retelling a joke, but evident in all sorts of statements, even a child’s book about hippos. Take the immediacy of the another’s physical presence away–obviously something social media routinely allows–and the honoring of this structure may be ignored.

We have no choice but to accept the continual chaos of online messaging. But solutions are easy. Think of a potential reader outside of your immediate circle. What do they need to know, and how can that be added in a brief but helpful way? Most explanations of one’s own circumstances often come with what screenwriters would consider essential “exposition.” It takes some effort but little space to construct a useful set up for readers even in unspecified audiences.

We are Captives of our Metaphors

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I can’t remember the first time someone pointed out to me that “my wires were crossed.”* Setting aside the validity of the observation, it is still a great phrase, and a reminder that we lean heavily on old and familiar language to express novel ideas.

For the moment let’s live with the wrath of our English teachers and treat metaphors, analogies and similes as the same thing. All involve thinking and shaping our thoughts in terms of an object or experience that we already know. The world presents itself to us clothed in the cognitive structures we have acquired and use. Since thought obviously rises from language, our relationship to the world is almost always reframed* in familiar terms that can be stretched beyond their roots. Broadly speaking, metaphors or analogies frame our everyday thinking. They are central to the process of creating meaning.

This begs the question about whether we can “know” an experience for which we do not have a name. It’s not impossible, but it is hard.

What a rhetorician like me wants you to notice is that the “mere rhetoric” that makes up the ordinary discourse of our lives are “tracks”* of thought—itself a metaphor–that deliver us to different insights. My head has probably conjured up that description because I sometimes think about trains and their history. But we could just as easily move on to language common to any “sphere”* of experience, such as names for colors. We get it when people talk about “blue language,”* a “blue note”* (a musical pitch that has been slightly flattened), a “blue mood,”* or “blue American states.”* But, of course, looking for “blue” Canadian provinces can suggest some cognitive carelessness. After all, Canada has five parties reflecting various shades of thought. There is probably a better frame of reference than our overworked color binary.* As it is, this overworked “blue” is already asked to carry a boatload* of useful thoughts.

While metaphors are vital tools for thinking, at the same time they can lessen the chances that new insights might be more helpful. As rhetoric theorist Kenneth Burke once said, language is essential, but categorical language can also lead us to some “trained incapacities.” To say that “the mind is a computer”* might have some uses, but it can also blind us to the huge differences between the living and inert worlds.

We are destined to construct our lives out of the bits that have made the most sense to us. The familiar language that we use is selective, idiomatic, and limiting. But there it is. We are the products of a large reservoir* of images and words that we can easily access. For example, it was a leap in my own thought processes to read and then ponder the useful idea of “brain fog.”*  The phrase describes a universal experience that needed a name.

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All of this talk of what amounts to “linguistic determinism” is a reminder to be conscious of the mental straightjackets* we have fitted out for ourselves.  In the end, it is often poets in words and music who remind us that we may not be using the right kind of language to characterize the world around us. They have usually engaged in the kinds of elastic* thinking that can open up new opportunities for thought.

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*Even this short piece is not exempt from a large number of metaphoric references.