Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

black bar

Giants That Struggle With The Idea of Personhood

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , ,

The hard truth is that many rich mega-giants have lost the will to engage directly with their customers.

There was a time when major organizations had enough employees to deal with customer problems. Name the organization—a media outlet, a service provider for a utility, a business dependent on selling products and services—and there was usually a person ready to receive a question or complaint. “Customer service” meant a company tried to be available to those with whom they had a relationship. That is still true in business-to-business communications. For example, Ford certainly expects that a supplier will take their calls. But the public and social media side of the ledger usually offers no such chances. In a quiet revolution, A.I. robots have taken over customer relations while the rest of an organization sits behind walls of anonymity. Thousands of employees in the offices of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and scores of other companies are mostly insulated from the people that use their services. Commercial in even modest-sized organizations  are now careful to not list contact information.

There are outstanding exceptions in almost every area.  Amazon still offers phone help. At least a few years ago the electronics giant Onkyo was happy to put me through to an engineer to solve a technical issue. And local businesses show a lot of patience to still deal with customers.  But the “virtual assistants” up and running in most larger enterprises pull the con of giving a person’s name to microchips and algorithms that offer simulations of the human voice or texting, all with the increasingly lifelike lexicons of real human rhetoric. The great leap in speech-mediated A.I. can be awesome, but it has given us a kind of zombie intelligence that can only “think” in binaries and fake comprehension.

All of this takes personhood out of the equation, with real and often sad consequences. Imagine, for example, the fate of a new widow facing a labyrinth of health, state, county and employer bureaucracies to be contacted after the death of her partner. A few will be appropriately responsive.  But others will throw up a filibuster of recorded phone directories and “try again later” messages. Lately even Social Security can’t be bothered to pick up the phone.  And COVID is a poor excuse. If a person can still do interoffice communication with their colleagues, they can still represent an organization to customers or clients.

The hard truth is that many rich mega-giants have lost the will to talk directly with their customers. None of us would think it would be a good use of our time to try to call Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Granted, they have a lot of customers.  But most haven’t developed a graded gatekeeping system that would allow private and serious users to reach them.

I a challenge with Google  that is a good case in point. I have two Google e-mail accounts: hardly unique. But in this massive organization’s self-contained world–even using my real name, passwords and my patterns of internet usage–I am still “Person 1” and “Person 2.” And they are pretty sure that one of us is up to no good.  I benefit from using Google Analytics data for this blog. It does what Google does best: track, count and sort. But person 2—who, I swear, looks exactly like me in a mirror—apparently has no business even asking to see the data. Sadly, they think they are being useful to warn Person 1 that Person 2 is trying to break into my account. Ditto for Microsoft, with confounding and insistent new logins to expose what they see as different accounts hacked by robots. In the name of security, the idea of personhood has more or less been lost on them. They think a real person can read laughably smudged CAPTCHA tests. Meanwhile, these companies have moved on to creating networks they are selling as “teams,” apparently not noticing they have yet to master the basics of authentic one-on-one communication.

My more computer savvy friends will tell me there are workarounds for these inconveniences, especially if I am willing to take them on as my second job. But they are missing the point. In many cases there is only a useless “virtual (non)person” to “chat” with. Even a two-year old can detect the fraud of a fake human being passed off as the real thing: the original basis of the previously discussed Turing Test.

To be sure, organizations feel like they are under siege from product users who call insistently because they can barely understand the services they purchased. But these companies have abetted the constant connectivity they now want to run away from.  For sure, Americans have all but surgically implanted their phones in their right hands. Not-so-smart phones have become substitutes and surrogates for many of us. But its all part of their world these giants created, and they need to find better ways to deal with their users as humans.

No wonder electronic games are so popular with more Americans. They can make interacting fun—even if it is just with a machine. At the same time, many of us our losing our capacities to deal directly with others in the kinds of collaborative problem-solving that existed just a few generations ago.

black bar

Another Living Room War

Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

True to form, dictators in closed societies are the last to know or care about changes in public opinion.

At the height of the Vietnam War the New Yorker writer Michael J. Arlen published a short but evocative piece that, like any good criticism, gave clarity to key events in that decade. In Living Room War, he played out the effects of a nation witnessing its own atrocities almost as they happened. “Shooting bloody” was soon to become the norm for reporters embedded with our troops caught in that quagmire. Americans could not help but notice the horrific attempts to fight a war in the jungle, or the United States’ massive efforts to bomb the North Vietnamese into submission.

The article published in October of 1966 and later included in a book of essays was barely 2000 words long: a short summation of the efforts of war reporters like CBS’s Morley Safer, who covered the actions of Marines in the Mekong Delta. Images of troops and snipers being fired upon were part of the reporting, which CBS was anxious to add to the studio-based “tell” stories that were common at the time. Footage from the field was quickly edited onboard a plane routed to Tokyo, where it was uplinked via satellite to CBS’s Broadcast Center on West 57th Street in New York. The network concluded that it was all well and good to have Walter Cronkite describe the day’s fighting. But they wanted to add the hastily edited reports about the close-range carnage in front of viewers, even during the dinner hour. It is worth remembering that most Americans regularly watched one of the three network evening newscasts: what another critic likened to a daily gathering at the “national hearth.”

Arlen’s article title was enough to suggest what had changed with the advent of portable video equipment and satellite links. The ability of politicians and citizens to insulate themselves from the effects of war was vanishing. The costs were not to be measured using static slides of casualty numbers or a few wire-service photos. Wars were about to be personalized by embedded reporters and camera crews who took their chances along with the troops. Arlen’s article title was enough for us to suddenly realize the sea change in war coverage that was underway. Even then, Lyndon Johnson began to realize that “his” war was going to lose support. Fifty-Eight thousand Americans were lost before the U.S. retreated.

These days I think of this article, admiring what a good media critic can do, but also pointing to the obvious reasons for the unprecedented international revulsion of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army. No one can remain unmoved by the wrenching video segments of families in Ukraine struggling to survive the relentless onslaught.

True to form, dictators in closed societies are the last to know or care about changes in public opinion. But one could conclude that near total press censorship in Russia may not be enough to insulate ordinary citizens from the horrors their government is visiting upon Ukraine. Russia is not a perfectly closed society, especially with the flow of news and information still coming into the country via the internet. As Arlen might have predicted, ordinary Russians will soon see videos that will help explain why most of the rest of the civilized world has put their society on a path to financial destruction.