In some ways the reduction of the fabulously complex mind to the connectivity of neurons is akin to describing a piece of music in terms of the physics of air pressure.
Twenty five years ago interest in the subject of communication was largely confined to a limited circle of teachers and researchers in the fields of rhetoric, marketing and psychology. In addition, there has always been a uniquely American fascination with provocative topics like political “brainwashing,” advertising and the contagious cultural fads of the young. But over the period of the last quarter decade the circumference of the borders of communication, persuasion and related topics has grown to such an extent that it is even pushed into formerly distant fields such as ethnography and neurobiology. Especially in the latter field it now common for researchers to track “neural pathways” activated when subjects are exposed to everything from “shooter” video games to deodorant ads. Adherents to this approach are sometimes so confident of the possibilities in linking all human action to physical first causes that a few have even issued warnings to psychologists and psychotherapists that the days of talk therapies are numbered. So much for the idea of the individual as a truly free agent. The underlying assumption is that brain chemistry will eventually make personality transparent.
Factor in the alleged existence of brain “plasticity” which makes it possible to adapt to digital media and the dominant daily activity of Americans of attending to screens, and it becomes clear why nearly everyone is now in the thrall of the neurobiology of social influence.
To be sure, expanding explorations of how we try to affect each other is always going to be a good thing. But the growing fashion for seeking answers using brain imaging devices seems badly misguided. Mapping the “brain activity” of individuals while they view movies, play video games or scan web pages involves all kinds of dubious simplifications. There is no question that we have much to learn about specific brain locations and routes that are awakened by certain kinds of media and presentational forms. And while there is ample evidence that some messages and activities influence hormone releases that effect mood and feelings, the mistake of such mapping offers the false impression that a relatively new “science” will give the analysis of persuasion a level of certainly that it has never had.
It badly misses the mark to assume that persuasion can be understood as a function of chemical and electrical processes in the brain. After all, human communication is about the engagement of the mind, with all of the personal uniqueness that comes with it. The brain is indeed the physical site where thinking—cognition—takes place. But unlike nearly all other body organs, the brain has no single function. Instead, it encompasses a world of possibilities that are ultimately realized when an individual’s biography and memory are brought into play. It facilitates thought and perception, but in ways that are always intimately tied to the experiences of the individual. A person’s cognitive presence involves a rich mixture of early influences, their own social history and attendant memories. All may be possible because of brain synapses, but their significant effects have to be measured on their own terms: what meanings we assign to messages, how we feel about a subject, what we “know,” and what we believe about our intentions and those of others. In short, an individual’s interpretation of another’s words and actions is an outcome flowing from an infinite set of social, circumstantial and physical origins. It’s this interpretative function that makes communication so much more interesting to approach in biographical rather than bio-chemical terms.
In some ways the reduction of the fabulously complex mind to the connectivity of neurons is akin to describing a piece of music in terms of the physics of air pressure. To be sure, it is easy to measure sound this way, converting pressure into frequencies that can be displayed on an audio analyzer. But to study music or persuasion by focusing on their physical processes has the effect of mistaking the conditions necessary for their production with the deeper complexities of their essence.
Neuroscience researchers will often concede as much. But journalists trying to catch the next intellectual wave need to be reminded that a competent analyst of communication must first be an interpreter keyed into the unique worlds of audiences, who construct significance and meaning from the mysterious depths of their own rich experience.
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Adapted from the Introduction in Gary C. Woodward and Robert E. Denton Jr., Persuasion and Influence in American Life, Seventh Edition (Longrove Ill.: Waveland, 2014.
If here are pleasures in delivering anonymous and wounding responses, they make a mockery of the familiar cant that the “internet wants to be free.”
Pick a polarizing subject in our national life, tie it to a news story, and then take your own tour of the rough music that passes for online comment. It’s a dispiriting side-trip. The migration of news and opinion to the internet has made it possible for virtually anyone to pass on their first and often intemperate reactions to news stories, opinions, and other forms of public discussion. Responding only requires a simple digital device and a reactive instinct that usually plays out in contemporary America as an oppositional style. Many comments can’t even rise above the crude invective of a schoolyard taunt.
The problem is that online pronouncements from individuals using pseudonyms are allowed. With exceptions, online protocols accept the kinds of false identities that were once associated with characters in spy novels working behind enemy lines. 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.
It’s easy to see such names as the avatars of souls who lack the confidence to be engaged as full dialogical partners with others. But putting names to our opinions is part of living in a civil society. Members of the Fourth Estate with an interest in sustaining the ideal of public discourse seem to be at cross purposes by allowing pseudonyms in their “comments” sections. They contribute to a fraudulent rhetoric that keeps sources in the shadows. Commenting on the behavior or opinions of named individuals in unnamed responses is at least a small act of subterfuge. While subjecting others to the burdens of public criticism, abandoning our identity absolves us from the same standard.
What’s in a name? More than we might first assume. Even if an identified person is not known to us, affirming who we are is an elemental expression of our integrity. It is the clearest token of our personhood that we possess, and its use should be a demonstration of trust for the community we seek to address. If this sounds hopelessly romantic, it isn’t. Try miss-identifying another person. The correction that is sure to follow is a reminder that we cherish our birthright as an important marker of our identity.
To be sure, there are circumstances when revealing a person’s identity might be their death warrant or, at least result in their inability to work. Whistleblowers, political refugees, and others who have engaged in acts that could lead to deadly retribution have at least a conditional right to anonymity. But for the rest of us, advocacy from behind a scrim of anonymity is at least a mild form of intellectual dishonesty.
Some of the advocacy spilling out at the end of web-based stories is benign. But significant portions of this clandestine commentary exhibit a kind of free-floating rage. Typical is the kind of jawdropping scorn toward a writer or subject that suggests a respondent who is intent on dismissing rather than engaging others. Add in a certain number of “trolls” who fire off repeated rounds of vituperation simply to provoke, and we’ve defined a corner of our public rhetoric that grows darker every time the light of authentic authorship recedes. For trolls, the drone attack of harsh judgment is made safe from retaliation or responsibility by never having to leave the private space from which the target was struck.
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.
Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier has written about the online world’s erosion of an individual’s unique voice. In You are Not a Gadget he notes that “an impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorship.” Because it’s a system defined by the vastness of interconnecting networks, a “hive mentality” of frenetic sampling effectively plays down the uniqueness of an individual perspective. Information is aggregated and sources are slighted. Material from one author blends into another. Content is registered and defined in files that are merged and merged again. As with Wikipedia, “data” is primary; and sources are mostly unknown.
Part of this process is bureaucratic. Organizations prefer to communicate under the broad umbrella of the corporate brand. And part is the result of an active culture of libertarianism that flourishes within the culture of internet technologists. As political journalist George Packer has noted, many have a relatively withered view of the requirements for managing a civil society, finding solutions to social dislocation in the mastery of better forms of “connectivity.” This view sometimes extends as well to the digital departments of even “traditional” news organizations far away from the Shangri-La campuses of Silicon Valley.
The problem is that connectivity is not communication. To merge the two is to confuse a “platform” with the far more variable nature of human content. So while these technologists still regularly hail the idea of the “information revolution,” with that phrase’s implication that data is just another commodity, the bias towards connectivity allows them to miss the critical question of how data is sourced. Media platforms are relatively static. But the qualitative measure of a source’s worth is dynamic. It depends on determining personal credibility as the first of many checkpoints that will allow us to assign value to an idea.
The long term effect of this de-emphasis on authorship is to put into virtually everyone’s hands a tool for issuing ceaseless streams of public invective. Against the earnest business of news gathering and straight reporting, we seem to take special pleasure in issuing attitudes of defiance. A columnist offers a particular “take” on a policy initiative. A journalist records the words of a political candidate. Another reports the known facts involving the suicide of a teenager. Even for straightforward reporting, multitudes seem to lay in wait to correct the record. One need only read a few offhand “comments” attached to a story about the death of someone’s troubled child to witness the violation of a fragile space where strangers don’t belong. There’s good reason why we retain an American demonology for the likes of secret police, post-war Hollywood witch-hunts, and hidden cameras. If anyone makes a serious accusation, everyone involved should be able to claim the right to know their identity.
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 here are pleasures in delivering anonymous and wounding responses, they make a mockery of the familiar cant that the “internet wants to be free.” If freedom means anything, it must include a sense of personal obligation for the opinions we express.
(This post first appeared in The Sunday Star Ledger, June 30, 2013)
