How do information and opinion feed community growth?
That is one of the primary questions asked by Laura Gurak in her 1997 book “Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace” (Yale University Press), which I came across recently searching for a text applying rhetorical theory to community and social media. In the 13 years since this book came out, the cyber world she described is now a full-fledged daily part of most American lives. In fact, ”cyber” starts to feels anachronistic, because it is accepted fact that people of all ages use the web for news, information and entertainment. So much change in 13 years.
Gurak examined how the ethos of those early Usenet exchanges developed into a force that kept the Lotus MarketPlace product off the shelves and stimulated protest of the Clipper Chip. A combination of flaming discourse, hyperbole, overstatement and one-sided discussions helped fan flames that both drew the community together and (mostly) served the rhetorical purposes the ad-hoc groups that formed around the communication itself.
And that’s the piece worth noting: community formed around the communication. The identification of a problem coalesced a group around an issue. People chose to become engaged through a mostly techie communication tool (as it was back in the early 1990s). Many set to work on identifying and going deeper into the issue, even as they shared what they knew publicly.
I had a conversation recently with a small business owner which helped me see that he (and possibly others) is not understanding the much larger context within which his business sits. Many of us still think of the interweb as a (very) big Yellow Pages. It certainly is that, but less so as time goes on. But our “Yellow Pages” vision restricts our thoughts about web presence to getting our banner ad to some location where people can see it. And maybe we can manipulate the web so that our banner gets seen more clearly, or at least more frequently, than our competitors. But the budding promise is that like-minded people are finding each other as they make information, and themselves, more accessible. And more: people are finding others to be like-minded—even before they knew their own mind on a particular topic. That‘s the way conversation has always worked. I’m suggesting that the conversations on the web are creating community members and, possibly, customers. But for small companies, in an age where meaning is more and more important, are customers really the bottom line?
Yes. And no.
I write as a small business owner myself. I cease to exist as a business without customers. And yet, I’m constantly searching for something more than customers. I’m searching for partners who want to develop a compelling vision together and well, change the world.
Gurak traces the movement of several pieces of standard rhetorical theory as she walks through the history of these arguments surrounding Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip. The tools of communication that helped make an audience back in 1990 are in process today much more accessible to many. The question is: can we keep from duplicating the ethos of hyperbole and one-sided argumentation?
Just what kind of communities are we trying to form, anyway?
###
Google’s Nexus One and Voice Commands
My relationship with stuff is changing.
I look forward to the promise of voice commands on every field in my smart phone, which is noteworthy in the Nexus One. I’ve just discovered that my AT&T Tilt responds to voice commands. Sorta. It’s true there is a feature that allows me to talk at the phone. I can get it to recognize most of my family’s names, though my son’s name always starts a Latin Jazz tune from the Columbian band Sidestepper (preloaded on my phone). Annoying. Does my phone purposefully misunderstand me? Even when I use my best clipped public speaker voice, my “Call Mike Flannigan” never results in anything but contact information for Mark Whalen. I may say “New Appointment” and, well, nothing happens. I can lower my voice. I can slow my voice. I can speak closer to the microphone. But…do I need to work on persuading my telephone to do my bidding?
Most of our rhetorical situations involve people. Usually a speaker and an audience. As a copywriter, I’m most often thinking about persuading some target audience with a written medium—but you see the point: people persuading people. Aristotle wrote about the elements of persuasion and talked about using pathos (emotion), ethos (character) and logos (logic) to get attention (and buy-in). All of these are available when we interact with fellow humans. But which of these is needed for telling my telephone what to do? My phone can’t judge my character (or…can it?). I know it relies on logic, especially when I tell my Tilt to do things it was never programmed to do. But pathos…. Do I need to speak kindly to my telephone? What kind of relationship am I about to have with my telephone?
My wife travelled with a friend not too long ago. The friend called her son using a voice command. Though weaving through traffic at highway speeds, she spoke his name in a low, calm, soothing way. She spoke slowly and got through with her practiced recitation. She knew exactly what her phone would respond to. And that’s what she gave it. Once connected, she went back to her higher, quick-moving manner (which her son knew all too well) and persuaded him of something in short order.
We’ll adjust to new technology. We’ll learn to use voice commands to accomplish stuff. But I am starting to notice the relationships I have with non-human stuff: my phone. My computer. The lamp in my office. Is there a limit to the number of relationships I can have? Do my relationships with stuff crowd out my relationships with people?
###
Transcripts tell a story. That story needs framing.
Every story needs context.
Recently I applied for entry in an academic program. I had the opportunity to read my college transcripts from a couple decades ago. My shadowy recollection of college was that I started in electrical engineering, didn’t care about the classes (hated them, in fact) but soldiered on because that was the clear path toward economic security—or so I thought. Eventually, the engineering department and I sat down together and had a frank talk. Both of us felt there just might be a better place for me elsewhere at the UW-Madison. That’s when I made the switch to study philosophy and immediately felt like I had come home. Twenty years later, the cold hard facts on the transcript were much worse than I remembered. Yikes!
Subsequent experience and studies helped me understand there are some paths I am meant to walk down, and some I am not. Engineering was not one of those paths. Writing was and has been since. In applying to this particular academic program, I made the case that some of us learn what we’re about later in life. I tried hard not to say “slow learner.”
Whatever part of life we’re in, there’s a story that needs to be told. A story waiting for us to tell it. Where the story starts is not where it ends (I’m thankful for that). And even our retelling of the story makes it stronger, validates it, and causes growth in all sorts of ways in us and in our listeners. The guys who hung around Jesus the Christ told stories of what he did and who he was, especially after he died and came to life again. New Testament writers called them “apostles,” which means “ones sent to act on the authority of another.” (Donald K McKim, Dictionary of Theological Terms) Part of what these apostles did was tell stories. These stories gained traction as time went on and became cultural foundations (as well as personally life-altering for me).
Our communication is and always has been marked by the stories that help us understand our experience of life. Sharing our stories helps us grow.
###
Dylan’s “Forever Young”
I’m certain each age holds fresh delights, but I still hold a certain nostalgia for Dylan’s “Forever Young.” Check out Lance Strate’s blog and all the different versions that have been done over the years. All sound pretty good, but the Pepsi commercial is especially so. Does that sound like a copywriter talking?
Seems like a fitting tune for this beginning day.
###
History Mash
Lance Strate points to this wonderful satire of scientists from the future discovering and mashing together a history of the Beatles. Inspired!
Sight isolates. Sound incorporates.
What do we lose when we don't hear?
We talk endlessly about community but find the doing thereof problematic. It’s not just because we like the idea of people better than actual people, it’s that context sometimes stands in our way. Reading Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (NY: Routledge, 1993), I’ve come to wonder if technology divides us. Not any highfalutin technology like iPhones or mobile apps or Twitter or any of the current batch of ones and zeros in our pockets. I’m talking about a very basic technology that we all take for granted and is mostly invisible: writing and, in particular, reading.
When I was a kid, before I spent so much time reading, I was fascinated by my parents’ and grandparents’ conversations. “Fascinated” is too strong: there were moments of fascination, especially when they told some story of their life growing up. Or when they described some mistake they made—especially if it was funny. I had to listen carefully for those stories because mostly their talk was boring, about money or work or gardening or real estate or…well, you’ve listened to these conversations. The interesting stuff poked out every once in a while and that’s what kept me hanging around. It was entertaining to hear the stories. And they were stories I would not know of if I did not hang around.
“Sight isolates. Sound incorporates.” That’s Ong’s concise statement about what happens as we attend to our different senses (71). I think he’s right. Reading, for me, is mostly an individual thing. It’s rather private. I read all the time, and when I read, I am drawn into myself. I actually begin to resent when someone talks to me when I am reading because—limited person that I am—I cannot continue reading while they address me. And yet often I would rather keep reading then enter into conversation.
This is not a judgment on reading and writing and seeing. It is a simple statement of truth: sound, since it is an event (Ong describes sound as something we experience only as it stops or goes away), it is something “we” experience. It is shared. Sight pulls us into ourselves. Reading, in particular, pulls me in and makes me ponder stuff. The pondering goes on deep in my brain, even while I look up from my book as you address me. I’m listening. Kinda.
Here’s the thing: those conversations with parents and grandparents and loud uncles were truly an event. I recognize that now. And we responded as a “we.” We laughed. We cried (occasionally). We responded with an urgent “That’s crazy!” But it was what “we” did.
Not so with reading.
I’m preparing a class for Northwestern College to help writers write to build community using social media. My definition of community must expand beyond those folks that are physically nearby to include those who share common interests. Laura Gurak, in Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: the online protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), says the concept of community is rooted in place and in common values (8-9). Building community puts a priority on the sharing of those common values. But in this case, the building of community happens as individuals sit (or stand) and read. They read on their own.
I think of a church service. We listen to the preacher. We listen to a text read. It affects us together. We discuss it as we drive home and as we sit eating lunch. I wonder if those first people experiencing “church,” way back when the gospels were being written, way back when Paul was writing his letters (letters now incorporated between the leather-like covers of the book I own), shared a sense of wonder at the event of hearing. That shared event brought them together in a community, where they just had to talk about it. Because by talking about it they experienced it all over again. We have the same opportunity, but our technology calls us away. My book (or blog list or The Onion) calls me away from conversation. Perhaps it calls me away from community. But not necessarily.
What do you think?
###
Addendum: I mean no disrespect for those unable to hear. I am more targeting the shared experience of responding to something we’ve all experienced, which is open to all.
Why Do I Write?
Reading Charles Bazerman’s Handbook of Research on Writing (NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008) makes me think about exactly what I am doing when I write. The very first page spells it out:
“A world in which we read but don’t write is a world in which we do not have primacy agency. To gain direct agency it is necessary to be able to write, to produce the texts that will reach out to others, that will interact with others and influence them, that will mark our interests and perspectives in the literate world. It is by writing that we inscribe our place in the literate world and all the social systems that depend on literacy.”
This seems exactly right and is the motivation behind much of my own writing. I write because writing is a way of interacting with the world. When I write I am synthesizing information as well as responding to what the world throws my way. And beyond that, I write about things that are not yet important to others. I write hoping they will become important.
###
Facebook at Work—A Both/And Approach
Whole people go to work
Employers are of two minds when it comes to Facebook at work. One view is that it is a great time-waster and should be removed to an employee’s personal time. That view has much traditional merit because workers are paid for productivity. Productivity is part of the social compact we agree to when stepping across that corporate threshold.
Another view is to encourage employees to use their relationship-building tools to advance the cause of the corporation—much like United Health Group invited their employees to lobby congress (mind you, on a “completely voluntary” basis) against reform which could hurt the company’s bottom line. Of course, spouting company talking points in a Facebook news feed sounds even more plastic and lifeless than it usually does in a news article.
Is there a third-way, an alternative that lies somewhere between an outright ban and a manipulative directive? I put this question to a class of college juniors and seniors studying writing in organizations—people who swim in social media all day every day. One woman suggested the typical 5-10 minute coffee break as an opportunity for social networking. In fact, that has always been the traditional purpose of that break: connecting with people over a cup of joe. Generally those breaks have not been work related. Facebook and Twitter and the like mean that now those breaks are taken with friends scattered across the planet rather than colleagues in the next cube.
Of course employees access Facebook and Twitter all day without approval from their employers. But this third way suggests these conversations and relationship-building activities can be good for the company. Not only does limited corporate approval give a nod to employees as whole people who bring their whole selves to the workplace, it also recognizes that connections and communication are life-giving interactions that help a person deal with difficulty—wherever that difficulty happens to come from.
Granted, not every job can allow this. I’d rather my air traffic controller not check Facebook while we’re flying through a crowded airspace. But a lot of jobs have room for connections and communication. Let’s publicly recognize that connections and communication are a good thing.
###
conversation is an engine 