The Perfect Response | EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

From a communications point of view, concealing one’s identity is usually a breach of faith. But now anonymous comments are consumed as a form of entertainment, as if the collective id of a society has broken free of its constraints.

Like many children in the 50s, I thought it was a great stunt to sneak up on a neighbor’s house, ring the doorbell, and then go hide in the nearby bushes. Serious crime it wasn’t. But it did inadvertently remind my younger self of the not-very-useful-lesson that sometimes we don’t have to take ownership of our actions.

It’s never good when we can abuse the trust of others without paying a price. In our times we find the adult equivalent of hiding in the bushes every time we scan internet sites for the often dubious comments that follow. Many regretfully permit anonymous comments: Slate.com, and the Washingtonpost.com, to name two. To their credit, others such as Huffingtonpost.com and Facebook do not. We invite trouble when a person is free to weigh in on almost any topic without claiming their own name as the marker of a basic social responsibility. Hashtags representing various avatars allow us to escape the moral consequences of owning our comments, depriving the human recipients of our criticism the right to know who we are. Is it any wonder that many reactions to online stories are ill-considered, inflated and mean-spirited? Some swirl in virtual cesspools of rhetorical maliciousness.

Character assassination by proxy is never pretty, and can’t help but make us a coarser culture.

From a communications point of view, concealing one’s own identity used to be considered a fundamental breach of faith. This is the dark stuff that arises from whisper campaigns, witch-hunts, and those awful unattributed pamphlets alleging communist treason that ruined the careers of so many artists in the 40s and 50s. Character assassination by proxy is never pretty, and can’t help but make us a coarser culture.

I’ve written before about these writers who exist on the wrong side of the borders of civil discourse, most recently just after the bomb attack at the 2013 Boston Marathon. The complaints are still valid:

Typical are the monikers used by individuals who responded to a Slate.com story about the recent Boston bomb attacks. Slate was careful and responsible in its reporting. But as with most news sites, the individuals who signed on to make comments concealed their identities. Readers heard from “Celtic,” “ICU,” “ddool,” “roblimo,” “Dexterpoint,” “Lexm4,” and others. “Celtic,” for example, noted that the suspects were “Muslims,” expressing mock surprise that any of them would produce “terrorist actions.” “Dexterpoint” decried “lefties” who he imagined to be anxious to confirm that the terrorists were not Muslims.

At its worst, this is the territory of the unqualified conclusion and the fantasized conspiracy: often a stream-of-consciousness unburdening of personal demons unchecked by the kind of self-monitoring individuals usually apply in the presence of others. Turned outward, this reactive rhetoric is often a jumble of histrionics from persons who seem to want a stage and an audience, but lack the mettle to do more than offer taunts from behind the curtain.

Aristotle observed that an individual’s character is perhaps their most valuable asset. He subscribed to the conventional view that you reach others best when you offer an olive branch and the assurance of your good name. Instead, the oppositional language of denigration fills a simpler expressive need. What was once the art of public comment on national and community issues now seems more like an unintended registry of disempowerment. It’s easy to account for the attractions of screeds posted with abandon and without interest in preserving even the remnants of a civil self. But if there are pleasures in delivering anonymous and wounding responses, they make a mockery of the familiar cant that the “internet wants to be free.”

The functions of criticism and accusation come with the duty to be fully present. To engage in these forms without disclosing our identity amounts to a kind of moral crime.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

**^{Robert La Follette at an Illinois Chautauqua meeting, 1905 Wikipedia.org}**

Sometimes there is simply no good alternative to a lecture that inspires discussion of a complicated idea.

These days the lecture as a form of communication doesn’t get much love. The idea of an extended presentation to an audience who should want to know more usually engenders greater enthusiasm in the presenter than the intended recipients. The speaker is almost always in the thrall of their specialty. But these days auditors are easily unfocused and distracted: often ill-prepared to sustain their attention and set aside their electronic umbilicals.

And then there are weak talkers. In our times if a dramatist wants to paint a picture of an old pedant practically dead on his feet, she can do no better than put him in front of a class mumbling on about some disciplinary canon. My favorite is an ancient fossil of a teacher in the film Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) prattling on to his young charges who have more important things on their minds.

Educational styles favored in our times emphasize experiential learning which, roughly translated, means learning by doing. That, along with our visual bias for the presentation of all forms of information (u-tube clips, PowerPoints, iPads and Smart Boards), works against finding satisfaction in the cumulative power of a well-conceived lecture.

**^{Temple Grandin at a TED Talk, 2010 Wikipedia.org}**

Perhaps its my training as a rhetorician, but I retain a lot of faith in a coherent talk as an effective means to both convey ideas, and perform the necessary enthusiasm for them. There is no better alternative to a call for change issued by a preacher or a public intellectual, or an invitation from an academic to greater understanding of a complicated but revelatory idea. If we’ve been lucky, we can can recall at least a few times when we were hooked into the love of a subject by a passionate talker. Ideas that may be dead on the page can come to life if they are embodied.

As a form, the lecture is also a meeting of minds in the same space that makes possible the kind of interactivity that often attributed to digital media, but often absent. I recall a master- teacher biologist in my first year at Colorado State University. He was a mesmerizing presence, at once amplifying complex ideas while giving them importance with real-world applications. His lectures on DNA were built around an accumulating swirl of drawings created as he spoke. The blackboard became a riot of color as he used various colors of chalk to fill in essential details of the Double Helix. His effort and interest were contagious. I also remember another professor at Cal State-Sacramento who could turn a single class period into an intellectual adventure. His lectures and questions seemed to owe something to the kinds of performances we were seeing at the time from gifted actors like Paul Schofield and Michael Caine. This teacher had all the theatrical tools he needed: a resonant voice, an animated face, and the kind of conversational spontaneity that belied what I’m sure was careful preparation.

In truth, many of us still love good lectures. TED Talks, podcasts, the popularity of massed online courses–in addition to packaged lectures on disk offered by master-teachers–indicate a desire to be the willing captive of an effective presenter. I agree with Molly Worthen, who recently noted in the New York Times that lectures teach the kind of disciplined communication practices we all need: the twin abilities to pay attention and to actively listen.¹Those who have mastered these skills know the rewards.

What makes a good presentation? What talents brought millions of Americans out on a snowy Saturday night 100 years ago to hear a speaker at their local Chautauqua? There’s no formula, but it seems clear that the best presentations allow us to see or understand the familiar with new and deepened sensibilities. They add a greater depth of understanding than we could discover on our own.

My guess is that I’ve lectured to students perhaps 2400 times over the course of a long career. My presentations are usually presented to groups of 25 students at a time: a better setting by any measure than a mass audience of a thousand or more. Sometimes the presentations go badly, though I’d like to think less frequently these days. And sometimes I flatter myself to believe that I made an 80-minute period –the standard on our campus–fly by. To be sure, that length is too long by at least 20 minutes. Indeed, a session that misfires in so sprawling a period can make it seem like the clock has simply stopped. A single session that wastes 80 minutes can be multiplied times the 25 members of a course, totaling 33 wasted hours. Knowledge of those stakes puts a significant amount of pressure on any conscientious instructor. I think I know how actors feel when they are about to step on stage.

Even so, a presenter on fire with their subject is a sight to behold. Although the TED Talks format only gives most of its speakers little more than 18 minutes, you can feel the growing momentum when one of them has taken flight with a room of rapt listeners close behind.

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¹Molly Worthen, Lecture Me. Really. New York Times, October 18, 2015, Sunday Review, p. 1

Comments Woodward@tcnj.edu