Tag Archives: situational awareness

“Does He Know We Can Hear Him?”

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

Public rhetoric is minefield of unintended meanings. It needs to be tempered by alert self-monitoring.

With his usual flair for irony Stephen Colbert tossed out the question that heads this piece during his CBS show that included a video clip of President Trump. The President predictably decided to go off script at a gathering of his formal Board of Peace. With dignitaries from 20 nations in the room, he decided to remind them and those watching how much he liked young women. This thought escaped into this formal setting on February 19th, the very moment that most of the world was fixated on the unfolding Epstein/Prince Andrew saga of trafficking of girls and young women.

To say the thought was ill-timed is obvious. It fell out of his mouth after he veered into the weeds by complimenting one young diplomat on his good looks. One can imagine that after he made this strange observation it would be wise to chase the thought further down a rabbit hole, making it clear that this was not a homoerotic point. So he quickly added his own misfired punchline: but “women—I like.”

The leaders in the room sat in stunned silence. And so Colbert’s question was both a joke and a pertinent inquiry about Trump’s ill-timed self-own.

Is there any consistent situational awareness evident in his comments? Does he know what he should be saying at a formal event? This instance is another reason why presidential staffs like their bosses to work from carefully prepared manuscripts. Yet Trump fashions himself as a natural wit and raconteur. He is neither.

Public rhetoric is tricky. It needs to be tempered by a careful degree of self-monitoring. A person needs to anticipate how comments made to others will be heard and understood. Failing at this vital social skill is like driving a car with a gas pedal stuck to the floor. More specifically, Presidents can’t use formal gatherings to deliver asides or rants more common to a social media troll. If not for him, the regrets of his staff must pile up faster than cars on an icy road. And the biggest risk is to be the last person in the room to notice the calamity of a verbal impulse not captured in time. Trump’s persistent tendency to want to chase after his randy reputation in comments about the appearance of women journalists only adds to the increasing association of him with the womanizing Jeffrey Epstein.

As I noted a decade ago, the concept is central enough to be at the center of measures of social intelligence. The idea is meant to identify those traits of character that allow for the tempering of one’s own impulses to successfully mesh with the needs and feelings of others. This is another way to describe a person’s “rhetorical sensitivity:” an ability defined by Rod Hart and his colleagues to imagine “how one views the self during communication, how one views the other, and how willing one is to adapt self to the other.” Worded in a questionnaire where agreement affirms this general awareness, some of the items include the following:

  • One should keep quiet rather than say something which will alienate others.
  • The first thing that comes to mind is [not always] the best thing to say.
  • When talking to your friends, you should adjust your remarks to suit them.
  • A person who speaks his or her gut feelings is [not always] to be admired.
  • We should have a kind word for the people we meet in life.

A thought often misattributed to Cicero is still a good one: “As man speaks, so is he.” It is probably too much to expect that Trump will ever acquire the social intelligence necessary to lead with empathy and compassion. In the meantime more of us respond by adopting versions of his rough rhetoric of personalization in our own counter-responses. In the end, the morality of human decency gets slighted in the very settings where it is needed most.

Did We Miss Something?

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , ,

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.

question mark

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.