DIETROLOGY 3

DIETROLOGY
The Nature Of Facebook/Twitter Updates

Ana's simple question, so disarmingly articulated, rendered me speechless. It happened about twenty years ago during a chat over coffee, and I would have been effusively babbling on about my day. After listening politely, she hit me with charming directness.

"William, why are you telling me all this?"

Initially seemingly unanswerable, I contemplated upon it for many months, whilst, at times painfully, reevaluating almost every subsequent utterance I, and others, made. Ostensibly, I'd been telling her about my day, and yet what purpose did that serve her or me? What was behind this communication, for that matter any conversational communication?

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it's little more than a need to be heard.

A need to be heard for existential validation. And to successfully realise this mutual need we: allow for conversational reciprocity; employ rhetorical devices to make our chatter entertaining (e.g. through humour), or intriguing (through common themes of interest); exploit status differences to be heard (e.g. teachers, leaders, priests, etc.); use devices to elicit sympathy; and so on.

It was with this increased sensitivity to the hidden whys of communication that I initiated a fascination with the modern phenomenon of our Facebook/Twitter/MySpace updates. They have two curiously unique features: first, the communication is made to nobody in particular, as if to an unknown second person, to an unspecific you; second, there is a severely tight numerical word restriction.

On the face of it, these updates are just small chunks of trivia, with little depth or meaning. Or are they?

There's an old joke of the apprentice Trappist monk who is permitted two spoken words at the end of each initial twelve months' training in silent contemplation; at the end of year one, he tells the abbot, 'bed hard'; after the second, 'food horrible'; and the third and final, 'go home; to which the abbot exclaims, 'well, thank God for that because you've done nought but complain since you got here!!'.

Paradoxically, it seems the more restricted our opportunities to communicate, and the more remote and less defined the second person is (the you), the more meaningful the utterances become. 'Meaningful' I define here as more revelatory of our identity, along with our illusion of identity. In the case of ostensibly glib online status updates, through the application of dietrological analysis, much can be inferred.

Accepting and bearing in mind this need to be heard to be validated, below is a suggested hierarchy of factors for measuring that need.

- use of first person pronouns (I, me, my, mine etc.)
- frequency of first person pronouns
- proximity of first person pronouns to the beginning (e.g. commencing with 'I')
- use of active or passive voice
- expressions of opinion (an implicit or explicit 'I think that...')
- ratio of factual detail (times, places, names etc.) over process language (feelings)
- degree of assumption of second person interest
- pseudo-attempts to engage (e.g. throwing out a question, attention-seeking, sympathy-seeking)
- enigmatic, in-jokes

The feeling of validation from conversation comes with verbal and nonverbal responses to our utterances which we've already established as often not being a reliable indicator of chemistry or rapport owing to the invisible effects of, for example, our choice of language patterns. This is even more the case here.

coming soon:
DIETROLOGY : What Are Movie Credits For?
DIETROLOGY : Poker Face

DIETROLOGY 2
DIETROLOGY: INTRODUCTION

DIETROLOGY 2

DIETROLOGY
The Collateral Damage Of Everyday Conversation

Within academia there is a punishment/reward structure that heavily favours a language register that can be generalised in two ways: firstly, emphasis on the precise use of specialised lexis and labels (often of Latin/Greek origin, an historical hangover from the relationship between learning and the clergy); in other words lots of long words, which in turn has triggered a certain inverted snobbery from non-academics. And secondly, the language of detail is preferred to that of feelings and emotions.

This goes some way to explaining why so many lecturers, teachers, and postgraduates evolve programmed into such crashing bores. That said, it's pretty obvious when we are bored with someone: perhaps you lean your head on your hands, perhaps an impatient check of the watch or mobile phone, or perhaps a tactfully stifled yawn. My god, is that the time?

However, what is loosely, but not inaccurately, termed as the 'chemistry' between people is mostly happening imperceptibly - both in terms of the responses, and the specific triggers for such responses. For example, the arbitrary angles we might approach a person we wish to communicate with is a factor that we rarely consider, and yet, critically, a frontal 45 degree approach angle is experienced by the other party as friendly, whereas one from directly in front as hostile; or worse still from the side or behind. What if you passed or failed that job interview based on that fact alone? And without being aware of such a factor, it's easy to see how superstitious explanations for the outcomes of personal interaction predominate.

Academic overemphasis on content language is as ironic as it's misguided: it's from having an acuter awareness of the tiny, oft-ignored words, and the simple patterns to which they belong, that offer far more rhetorical expressiveness and control of desired responses, and therefore chemistry. When we like or dislike somebody, we may have all sorts of superstitious 'I think...' beliefs about what we like or dislike, but they are far more likely to be rationalisations for unconscious biological and chemical responses.

Some of the effects of language usage have been touched on in previous postings (cf. SIGNFICANCES, METASIGNIFICANCES). One of whose number which seems to exist in most languages is the extraordinarily common 'yes, but...' conversational pattern (variants being 'I agree (with you), but....', 'that's true, but....', and so on). This, invisibly, causes enormous collateral damage to rapport owing to its deadly subtext of 'what I'm about to say is more important than what you've said' - in fact, amazingly, outright disagreement causes less collateral damage than this murky use of 'but'. The negative effect can easily be repaired by substituting the word 'but' with 'and', the subtext then being one of friendly corroboration - even when going on to disagree with the original statement in otherwise exactly the same way.

This is a simple example of how the use of two tiny words in a language pattern can have, psycholinguistically speaking, contrasting polar responses of critical importance. Simple, but not easy. Schools and universities might reward your deployment of all kinds of polysyllabic goodliness and convoluted subordinate clauses within the discussion of various hypotheses, but thanks to an historically ingrained institutional ignorance, you won't find out about the really good stuff like 'and'. There's so much more to learn.

DIETROLOGY : The Nature Of Facebook/Twitter Updates
(text coming soon)

DIETROLOGY : What Are Movie Credits For?
(text coming soon)

DIETROLOGY: INTRODUCTION

DIETROLOGY

DIETROLOGY
Introduction

You wouldn't believe the size of the mug of Americano in front of me in this Cologne coffee shop. Total mondo. Not to impress you, it's to help get this tricky post finished.

Dietrology. For quite some time now, I've sought a word to conceptually unite many personal ideas and recent theories within a single domain. For that purpose, I've brazenly co-opted dietrologia (from the Italian 'dietro' - behind). It is, therefore, the study or analysis of the perceptually invisible, of what lies behind language, events, actions, processes, and behaviours.

It's clear we all have a natural tendency to posit instant opinions about subtexts, prefaced explicitly or implicitly with languaging such as 'I think....' - something I prefer to classify under the umbrella of superstition. The other tendency, related, is to assume that that which does not makes sense to us is nonsense; exemplified by the etymological origin of barbarian derived from the ancient Greek term for 'foreign', a derogatory onomatopoeic reference to the sound non-Greeks seemed to make. Another example is represented by patronising Western attitudes towards African music and art with terms such as 'primitive', or even 'world' or 'ethnic'.

The first lesson of dietrological analysis is to recognise that something that doesn't make sense to us may very well have complex sense, or indeed, may have no sense whatsoever. The directly perceptual is not enough to make the assumption one way or another. The second lesson is relative: the quantity and quality of the perceptually invisible is not measurable.

However, the third and most critical, is that dietrology differs from opinion and superstition in that it represents an inquiry into the heart of the matter, that which is factual. And in an illustrative way, the study of atomic particles, just as they cannot be seen with the naked eye (with or without the aid of microscopes) owing to their being hundreds of times smaller than the smallest light waves, is a form of dietrological analysis.

Anyway, enough dry talk already. Let's launch a few introductory sub-articles for the series; as always, comments highly appreciated.

DIETROLOGY : The Collateral Damage Of Everyday Conversation
(text coming soon)

DIETROLOGY : The Nature Of Facebook/Twitter Updates
(text coming soon)

DIETROLOGY : What Are Movie Credits For?
(text coming soon)

MATTER CONSTRAINING MIND

Edinburgh University was the host venue for the latest invitee, Professor Michael Gazzaniga from California, to the prestigious Gifford series of lectures held at the four ancient Scottish universities. The lecture series has the purported intent of contributing to the advancement of philosophical and theological thought: 'natural theology', whatever in hell that means.

It's remarkable how a formal academic gathering in the imposing high-ceilinged Playfair Library with a couple hundred respectful erudite scholars can affect one's perspicacity - even for someone as avowedly hostile to the orthodox academic model as myself. It was only some time later that the extraordinary shallowness of the enterprise became apparent.

Psychologist Professor Gazzaniga wibbled and wobbled his way through his first two talks (Free: The Science Of Mind Constraining Matter), barely able to read aloud the unbelievably lightweight nonsense typed out in front of him. This was all accompanied by an inconsequentially superficial PowerPoint presentation replete with grade school spelling/punctuation mistakes and the inevitable moments of malfunctioning multimedia. If he wasn't inefficiently employing Dawkins' trademark rhetorical device of the absurdist example to prove highly contentious points, Gazzaniga was tossing around terms such as 'mind' and 'thoughts' and 'consciousness' and 'experience' and 'morality' with such inebriatedly undefined abandon that you wondered how on earth he even managed to gain a degree, let alone a coveted invitation to the Gifford Lectures.

However, it was the brief post-lecture Q&As that really found him out. The audience's questions were mostly insightful and pertinent to the topic, yet when Gazzaniga didn't freeze up completely, he invariably chose to misinterpret their focus through brazenly inaccurate rewording; a tried and trusted mechanism by teachers to avoid having to admit to not having an answer, thus preserving the vanity of their given social status as founts of knowledge.

It enrages you even more to consider the plight and gratuitous suffering of the thousands of research animals at the bloodsoaked hands of 'scientists' like Gazzaniga and company. I won't make this worse by relaying some of the nonsensical experiments alluded to - suffice to say that we humans are apparently so special and so unique because the other animals can't play the fucking piano.