A person who is “the same with everyone” is perhaps not as well adapted to their social environment as we might think.
Anyone studying human communication will soon realize that there is a built in paradox that pits our assumptions about personal authenticity against convincing evidence that effective communication requires many selves. There are those famous words from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. . .”
And there’s this reliable contradiction: while we long for connection to individuals who will not say the wrong things in the wrong places, we also want reliable friends we can count on to be their predictable selves. If these two ideas aren’t at odds with each other, they are surely going in different directions, explaining why even those we know best can still disappoint.
Variations of what’s called “role theory” in sociology and “dramatistic ratios” in communication emphasize the consummate role-player. Each posits that, over time, we become performers able to manage how we present ourselves to others. We have many faces: whatever a setting requires.
Imagine some of the roles that may exist for a young woman with her own family: mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, friend to a prickly neighbor, friend to others who don’t like the prickly neighbor, employee, church committee chairperson, weekend campaigner for a social action movement, and so on. Any of us who interact with “Meg” will know her by mostly what she says and does. But we are also not likely to see her in all of her other roles, something of a blessing for her. If she is reasonably well adjusted, she plays her parts well. In essence she is a one-person repertory company, since each setting puts her in front of a different audience. Meg may tell racy jokes over drinks with some friends. But she’s a different kind of person with her children, her parents and certainly those folks at the church where she helps out. A person who is “the same with everyone” is not as able to deal with their social environments as well as we might think.
The challenge for us is that, while we express enthusiasm for the idea of “personal authenticity,” the odds are great that we would be uncomfortable with individuals who struggle to meet the different normative expectations of different “audiences.” Violations of these expectations in the forms of unusual behavior and ill-chosen words would probably be enough to make us want to put some distance between ourselves and Meg.
Think of all the one-off individualists we celebrate in the movies (characters created over the years by Walter Matthau, Jack Nicholson, James Cagney, Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew Mcconaughey, Dustin Hoffman, Lena Dunham or Vince Vaughn.) Character actors often give us individuals who seem to have been cut from a different cloth. But even though they attract us to screen narratives, their characters might well repel us as friends. In the flesh, we love our adaptable companions. Role-taking oils the social machinery that we would prefer to run smoothly.
People diagnosed on the autism spectrum are sometimes less able to read social cues. Many discover that by memorizing common social “scripts” they can still manage in what would otherwise be bewildering settings. To be sure, many have compensating strengths, like better resistance to the kinds of distractions that plague many of us. Even so, like those for whom the social impulse comes more easily, they can appreciate the value of the daily shape-shifting that is part of making one’s way in the world.
This is the realm of the problem-solver, the creator, the owner of a consciousness that will discover and understand what a fragmented thinker may never find.
By definition, a distraction is a detour. It happens when the continuity of some effort is broken by the need to shift attention elsewhere. Since this website is dedicated to communicating in “the age of distraction”—be it advertising clutter, too many texts and e-mails, or the frenetic pace of overscheduled lives—we should have an interest in persons who resist all the cultural noise.
One answer to this problem is to discipline ourselves to follow a more linear pathway, even though cultivating this kind of thinking cuts against the grain of the culture. And it’s not easy to tell the world to take a hike while we muse alone in our own self-made bubble.
Linear thinkers take many forms: avid readers content to devote large chunks of time to a single work of fiction or non-fiction, artists happily left alone to work through decisions that will end up on canvass or as musical notation. And of course we’ve enshrined the image of the “mad scientist” as a loner following the threads of their research with long hours in the lab, leaving family and friends to fend on their own.
George Frederick Handel wrote the great oratorio Messiah in spurt of nearly unbroken concentration, finishing in just over three weeks. And imagine the sustained effort required by William Lamb’s architectural firm, who designed and prepared drawings for New York City’s Empire State Building in an incredibly short two weeks. The iconic skyscraper was completed in just over a year. Such dedication to a single task can be scaled down to what many writers sense when they notice the time that vanishes when they are absorbed in their work.
The linear thinker looks forward to clearing the decks sufficiently to be able to see an unobstructed view of the horizon. Undisturbed concentration gives them power. This is the realm of the problem-solver, the creator, the owner of a consciousness that will discover and understand what a fragmented thinker may never find. Unbroken attention to a task allows a first effort to build on the synergies that begin when scattered thinking begins to see connections and consequences that others may miss.
This is more or less the reverse of the kind of segmentation of effort that is now embedded in our work and so much of our media. A reader’s time on a single web page is usually under a minute. And we are getting cues from all over that we’re not noticing our preference for hyper-compression. Consider, for example, the New York Times reporter who recently noted in passing that an individual “argued” a point “on Twitter.” Really? Can a person “argue” in the traditional sense of the term—which includes asserting a claim and it’s good reasons—in a verbal closet of 140 characters? Twitter imposes absurd limitations on the expression of thoughts, matched by political ads that “argue” public policy in 30-seconds, television news “sound bites” from policy-makers that average around eight seconds, and the de-facto editing style of commercial television that cuts individual shots into lengths of two or three seconds.
We now think of a Ted Talk with a maximum running length of 18 minutes as an “in depth” discursive form. No wonder some of my students think of a 70-minute lecture or a 40- page chapter as the functional equivalent of a long slog across a vast desert.
Interestingly, one of the features sometimes seen in a person at the higher end of the autism spectrum scale is a consuming and total passion for one thing. Subjects with Asperger’s are especially known for their laser-focused interests, making them a challenging fit in a culture that rewards frequent pivots to completely different activities. Psychological historians believe we can thank mild forms of autism for the achievements of Mozart, Beethoven, Charles Darwin, and Lewis Carroll. And it’s surely Aspergers that seems the dominant psychological trait of the world’s favorite sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.
Given the misplaced importance of multi-tasking across the culture, it makes sense that there is building interest in novel ideas like the self-driving car. Negotiating a ribbon of open road is a linear process that seems increasingly beyond the capacities of distracted drivers. It’s probably better to let a computer take care of a task many are less equipped to manage themselves.
If we think we have identified a significant problem here, we probably should be more humble and note that these few words on the attributes of linearity are maybe more useful in illustrating non-linear thinking. The concept deserves a book more than a blog.
